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Judge Demands Details Of FBI's Keylogger
wb8foz writes: "EPIC is reporting that Judge Politan has told the FBI to come up with details on the keystroke logger they used against Scarfo. Previously, the FBI claimed the technology was so Zuper-seKret that telling anyone how it worked would threaten 'national security'..."
Uh, sorry sir. You're off by about 98. Fool 10-year-old. Either that, or nice script.
Oops, wrong URL (points to a review). You can buy them here
And if you hide them inside the keyboard or inside the PC they are difficult to find.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted and ignored otherwise.
It seems to me (from what others have said) that this surveillance does not meet the criteria for a wiretap (no interception of communication etc.). So, are there any special rules about the authorities going into your home and installing a tiny surveillance camera? That wouldn't be a wiretap either. The Bill of Rights seems pretty clear: a warrant only allows them to enter your home looking for some particular and prespecified stuff. Installing surveillance equipment of any kind seems a pretty long stretch.
And let the angel whom thou still hast serv'd tell thee ...
I thought the only way to "legally" kill someone was in self-defence. ...
But then I know nothing of your American ways
The issue here is not, Are there any circumstances under which the government has a compelling issue in obtaining evidence by wiretap, bug, or whatever? The issue is, how high should the bar be set? How hard should it be for the government to show such need?
The FBI argues that this is not a wiretap and so it meets low standards. The defendant holds that it was a wiretap and hence needed a specific warrant to be placed.
People like to cast these things as black-and-white: Either the government can't bug us, and we are totally free; or the government can, and we are entirely enslaved. Unfortunately for such extremists, history has always been more nuanced: The American judicial system always works on the principle of balances and tensions. What's important is to set the price of such invasions so high that they be used only in the most extreme, most justifiable conditions.
This case is, in large part, not about the technology that is used but about the accountability of those who use it.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
It occurs that a simple measure against a keylogger is to run a program which continuously polls the keyboard, making note of any occasion during which the keyboard is unavailable (or during which the computer has not been functioning, meaning it's been turned off), and which gives alarm to the user just before he begins work after having gone for some time. (Detection of this absence could be automated with a cheap fuzzy vision system that only checks for warmth in front of the monitor, and for motion indicative of a human and not a cat or very warm chair).
The electricity bill from leaving a computer on all the time (as would be necessary), and the cost of a reliable uninterruptable power system, would be a small price to pay in such cases where the owner has reason to worry about spying and the implantation of such sneaky devices.
The aim generally would be to make the computer an integrated, always-functioning system that "knows" when oddities occur, such as being turned off, or losing the keyboard, or being moved more than a few millimeters, or anything else that could be interpreted as tampering (when the authorized user is absent, obviously).
Naturally, this measure works against hardware spying only. Software spying is another matter, but the hardware is the first and most important line of defense.
A truly excellent pizza parlor is a delight unto the heavens. Treasure the sauce and the toppings!
"what if" my butt... I have had a considerable ammount of fun using Subseven in the past.
It is pitch dark. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
A PC keyboard, be it PS/2 or AT, only uses 4 wires. Donno about mac, and it seems to me that doing this to a USB kb would be a serious pain in the ass.
I don't think there's necessarily a connection between being able to describe it and whether or not it violates our constitutional rights. What it also implies is that their method, once known, is easily defeatible -- "security through obscurity" rearing its ugly head.
It seems to me possible that the FBI is using a device that can actually monitor a keyboard without touching it. If you ever turn the volume on your soundcard way up, you'll notice that you can hear in the static different notes depending on which keys on the keyboard you press.
This isn't something the average shmuck could defeat easily if he knew about it, but the larger fish which make and break FBI agents' careers do have the resources to install jammers for such occasions. So it is quite possible that the FBI has a point here.
Well, this is supposed to be funny, but now I wonder whether it's joke or paranoia.
hany
What exactly is the big deal of writing a keyboard driver?
We're sorry, the phone number you have reached is imaginary. Please rotate your phone 90 degrees and try your call again
?It probably works like this: http://www.gadgets-inc.com/keykatcher_main.htm
I've got 20 to 1 here that their supposed "key logger" is a piece of utter dummyware, much like the visual basic piece of shit that ``rodona garst'' (URL?) spam-madam used to "hide" IP addresses by converting them from dotted decimal to plain decimal...
Isn't The Law great? I have to look into publishing legal documents for their entertainment value...
-- H. Wilker
how did you get "at least 1000 bits of entropy" with a 280 bit passphrase?
C. M. Burns
My root password is 14 mostly random letters, numbers, and symbols, and my PGP pasphrase is 35 charcters of junk. Yes, I've memorized them. I'd estimate my PGP pasphrase to have at least 1000 bits of entropy, as it has no real words in it. I belive that even with all the computers in the world working on it, 1000 bits would still take an insanely long time to crack.
Is the judge going to hold the FBI in contempt?
screw tracing the circuits, cross two lines on the matirx and see what comes out
watch me get modded insightful and regret posting AC
And even if it does drop to PROM mode, typing "go" will almost always let it continue. You can guarrentee no effect using the eeprom command froma root shell but that may not be possible.
SWAPPED THE KEYBOARD ?!?
I dare anyone reading this to tip their keyboard on its side and give the back of it a few whacks. If it isn't unnaturally clean or been recently cleaned, your keyboard hasn't been swapped. Of course this doesn't mean your harddrive is free from SnoopWare.
"Face it, a nation that maintains a 72% approval rating on George W. Bush is a nation with a very loose grip on reality.
it sometimes takes more than 2 million keystrokes to invoke certain commands in emacs.
Typical for the FBI to think they know more than everybody else does.
A hardware keylogger can be implemented by a student of electrical engineering or any gifted amateur in perhaps a week or so. Typically a PIC microcontroller would be used together with an external serial EEPROM. With e.g. 64KByte EEPROM this would cost about 10 Euro per device and be the size of a sugar cube. The programmer hardware would cost an additional 10 Euro, software is available for free. Larger EEPROMs require a bit more work (maybe an additional day), and are physically larger (2 sugar cubes). Price would be an additional 15 Euro for e.g. 512Kbyte.
And if you don't know how to build your own, you can buy them here.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted and ignored otherwise.
Since a keyboard scans all keys several times per second it generates a signal on a certain wavelength that can be picked up with a radio (try holding your shortwave radio near the keyboard with the monitor switched off). Analysis of this signal allows people sitting in a van outside your house to know what you're typing due to the interruptions in the 'buzzing' signal normally received, which only happens when keys are pressed. The time from the start of the scen identifies which key is pressed.
Its all very clever.
Weevil
ghaa.
Embed a bit of non-volatile RAM in the keyboard controller chip. To retrieve the data, seize the keyboard, desolder the chip, and apply TTL to pins that are grounded when the keyboard controller chip is still soldered to the keyboard. Totally undetectable, and it could be done at the factory to every keyboard shipped.
The privacy of Joe Average is "maintained" the the fact that Joe's keyboard is rarely seized. Just make sure NSA doesn't use these keyboards.
I dub the idea "bugboards", and anyone who patents it has to deal with this Slashdot post constituting prior art.)
To the tinfoil hat crowd: With a suitably large clandestine payment to Winbond, "they" could have been doing this to a good 30-40% (if not higher) of the keyboards in existence for the past 3-4 years. Save your original PC/AT keyboards!
My personal speculation: If it's a hardware device, it's a Keyghost, possibly installed inside the keyboard. (Yes, if I were a Mafioso, I would check the keyboard port as part of a daily sweep for bugs. But I probably wouldn't grab a screwdriver and inspect the keyboard's guts.)
According to the Wired article yesterday:
This would be impossible (or at least highly improbable) with a hardware device. With software, however, it could be done - log everything until you see PGP running and a passphrase being entered. Then stop logging.
I have a hunch it's software, not hardware, for another reason.
This whole case revolves around whether the FBI "placed a bug" (i.e. wiretapped) or not. "Bug" has traditionally meant a hardware device, which does not appear to be covered by the warrant. (If they had a warrant to place a bug, the defence wouldn't be arguing otherwise).
Even the most kl00less n00b of a judge would be able to see that a Keyghost or other hardware-based key-logging device is fundamentally the same as a microphone. One logs keystrokes. The other records voice. If the warrant didn't authorize the placement of an audio bug, it probably didn't authorize placement of a keylogging bug.
But if it's software, the Feebs can argue "Hey, it's not a device, it's just ones and zeroes on his hard drive. We left nothing, we just tweaked some magnetic lines of flux on a spinning piece of metal."
The funny part is that this is the same FBI whose lawyers are arguing (eg. DeCSS, Sklyarov, etc.) that even source code can be a "circumvention device". I guess code is a "device" when it serves the FBI's purpose, and "not-a-device" when it... well, serves the FBI's purpose.
The sad part is that it's going to take a pretty enclued judge to figure out that if DeCSS is a "device" for circumventing protection, then a keylogger -- even if it's just software -- is just as much a "device" for conducting a wiretap of the line between a keyboard and a computer.
Finally, doing it in software enables them to turn the logging off after they capture the PGP passphrase. I speculate that they realized they were treading on the outer fringes of what they could legally do under this warrant, and wanted to be able to make at least some claim that they minimized the amount of data to be captured.
All of this leads me to believe it was a software device, not a piece of hardware. "If we can't get a warrant to place a wiretap, let's do it with software, and then if the defence argues otherwise, we might at least have a shot at convincing the judge that software isn't a "bug" because it's made of bits, not atoms, and the wiretap law was written when the only technologies for wiretapping required atoms."
(The obvious argument for the defence: "In that case, Your Honor, we submit that the instant the software ran on the defendant's computer, the FBI had effectively installed a bug. Instead of it being the cute little ones you read about in Tom Clancy novels, it was a full-tower 1G Athlon bug. But it was still a bug.")
That said -- let's have an open mind. Maybe they're doing something more advanced than installing a Keyghost. Maybe they're using a new way of installing software known only to the 'l33t d00dz in the intelligence community.
Finally, maybe the technology is also in place now on real threats, and the bugs - hardware or software - weren't planted by "cops operating with a warrant", but by intelligence agents (or double agents), whose lives would be jeopardized by their targets' acquiring the knowledge to detect these bugs.
As much as I mistrust the FBI, if any of those scenarios is true (and they're all plausible), it doesn't matter how weak the FBI's case is in the case of this mobster, the tech should remain under wraps.
What happened at Roswell?
Who killed Kennedy?
How many licks does it take to get to the middle of a tootsie pop?
etc...
i remember watching a segment on discovery channel a couple years back about an experimental key logger. basically with standard keyboard, everytime you press a key you create a small EMP. using the hardware they had they could detect which key was pressed from several feet away and even through a wall. im sure the technology is much more refined and mature today.
But we knew that already
Well, *you* might not have known that already, but I did. It's also possible (with appropriately advanced equiptment) to recreate what is on a regular monitor (I'm unsure of LCDs) by the frequencies it bleeds as well.
It's just rather technologically difficult. But we already knew it was possible.
Certainly the FBI doesn't think everyone is that stupid (um..never mind)
May be the latest versions of PGP include the time between key presses as part of the passphrase?
There has been a major scientific break-in
Ok, maybe it would be cheaper to put a TEMPEST key on your keyboard. But I am a dumbass and my box is using DES passwords for some damn reason.
I was about to ask you what Diceware was but I will ask Google instead.
Geekizoid: The Small Shiny Things Network ©
Gobble a dick!
They just don't want to admit it.
.mil domain... but that could be anyone, and not the actual military trying to take me out.
I've actually caught one attempt to hit that port by a
Get your Unix fortune now!
Makes more sense then a HW soulition. How often do you Ctrl-Alt-Del and look for weird stuff?
It sounds to me like they just gave the judge a bunch of keycodes, and the judge doesn't understand how to go from keycodes to keys.
Once the FBI gives the judge a table of keycodes -> keys, I suspect the judge's "gobbledegook" comment will be answered. Now, the question is, will the judge accept the keystroke recorder as a part of a valid search warrent, or will the judge interpret the device to be a "listening device".
Remember, the whole danger of this device is not that it exists, it is that the FBI went in on a search warrent, and left a listening device behind which should require a wiretap order.
www.eFax.com are spammers
it's a simple peice of software that has been available on almost every teenwanna be cracker site for at least a year ,that's the last time i was at one.
Keylogging was simply copying every key you press to a file with an unrelated name.
All you have to do is copy the file when you go
back " harvesting " on a diskette or diskettes..
Really the judge could have asked any teen cracker and have an instant answer.
oh well ..
Threat to national security, right.
Somewhere in the heavens... they are waiting.
most likely. The FBI probably doesn't want to admit in open court that some guy walked a couple of blocks away to "Spys-R-Us" and bought an off-the-shelf keyboard logger at 5 X retail price. It would be laughable if they weren't dead serious to hide this....
The Government's penchant to hide everthing they do from the citizenry is insidious. How about requiring the President to personally sign each and every individual page of every single "National Security" classified document. That would certainly help cut down this effrontery of abuse, eventually. Classification by default is an insult to the intelligence and political franchise of the American people!
When are people going to get angry about being lied to and abused in the name of holy national security? The Cold War has been over for a long time now. Is this a police state or a republic? Can anyone tell the difference anymore? Please tell me; I really do care.
I do believe that you can legally scream obscenities at authorities, just be damned sure that you don't do anything illegal while you're in their sight. While they can't arrest you for talking at them, if you piss them off they'll follow you until you do do something illegal. (No, I don't know this from experience)
Do you even know anything about perl? -- AC Replying to Tom Christiansen post.
This reminds me of those programs for graphing calculators that make a nearby am radio play music. Is that the same thing?
It seems that whatever it is and however it works its basically like a wire tap or a planted microphone in terms of legal issues. And since the Court Order just says that they can get any information from the office including all information residing ont he computer's hard drive or removable media, but says nothing about leaving recording devices or wiretaps...It seems like this is a pretty straight forward violation of the law. Maybe I'm missing something.
King Arthur: Are all men from the future loud-mouthed braggarts? Ash: Nope. Just me baby... Just me.
I can just about guarantee you that the FBI would know what type of keyboard this guy had, would buy one exactly like it
What? One like my black six-year-old fujitsu/ICL keyboard with grey buttons originally sold with an old ICL MikroMikko Indiana computer? This does't exactly sound like a foolproof plan. How about wear? What if your favourite coffee stain just moved a bit one morning? The enter key makes a slightly different sound? The more I think about it the less probable it seems that the someone could just swap your keyboard. Especially since the target group - hackers (as in h4s3r d00dz) are likely to stick with keyboards they like until they (either of them) fall apart..
I think I would recommend the FBI installed BO2K on these computers. That would certainly give them the kind of offsite surveillance needed. And - best part - it's free. No taxpayer dollars wasted on an expensive program. Heck - the crime lord would probably go bustin' hacker ass looking for the guy that hacked him...
Oh no. Did I give away FBI's secret?!
Hmm. This was supposed to be funny. I guess it actually makes a limited amount of sense. How sad.
Stop the brainwash
I don't know about you, but my passphrases probably can't be cracked within the next five years. (And, barring sudden advances in quantum computing or number theory [factoring primes], in the next forever)....
Think about the fact that they've cracked only a 63 bit keyspace (halfway through the 64 bit keyspace) in the most massive distributed computing project to date. 63 bits is 9-12.6 characters, depending on how you count. (12.6 is 5 bits / character, which means you're only checking 32 characters, or 6 more than a lowercase alphabet. Diceware uses a 27 character alphabet, I think). My passphrase is 8 'words', where each word is a diceware word, which means that it's the equivilant to writing a number between 1 and 7776, which is 12.92 bits / word * 8 words = equivilant of 104 bits. (You can draw a 1:1 mapping between every state that 104 bits can be in and every 8-word diceware passphrase that I can select). 104 bits is not foreseeably crackable. CRAY can't do shit.
Nobody could ever swap my keyboard without me noticing. It's far too dirty; last time I turned it upside down and shook it, you won't believe how many breadcrumbs fell out.
:)
This is what comes from eating at your desk
http://www.themeparks.ie
Step #1, Dvorak:
.. doesn't use any kind of adapter they have ever seen.
This would really annoy someone. At first glance, someone will say "this device just recorded garbage!". Of course, anyone who really wanted you bad would pass some statistical analysis through it, so if you suspect you are being tracked, do a lot of perl programming. The prevalence of %!(!@%$(!@*% will throw off the %'s
Step #2, USB!
Glad to use an Apple G4 at the moment (OS X!). Keyghost says:
* (MacOS & USB keyboards not currently supported).
Keep this in mind, though I'm sure it will be rectified in the near future. Of course, they could just stick a convertor behind your machine and hope you don't notice -- so buy a machine without a PS/2 or AT keyboard port.
Step #3, Kinesis
They sell a cute KeyGhost Security Keyboard, that looks like a natural keyboard of sorts. Insist on a Kinesis keyboard at work! Not only are these great keyboards, but when your boss (or FBI at home) see the keyboard, they will really say to themselves.. "huh?".
That, and you can get the QD model like I do with the dual dvorak/qwerty caps just to mess with their heads more.
Step #4, Run a less popular OS & Architecture
This one is primarily for software key loggers. If your in trouble with the law, the best way to play with them is to work harder. Like for firewalls, one of the best ways to keep yourself a little more secure is to use a less-common OS & architecture.
If you say, use a Sun Ultra at home (without USB), running preferably solaris, but insert any OS here. I'm sure they will have some choice swear words when they see that your mouse plugs into your keyboard, and your keyboard
That and, I'd be likely to say that they don't run into many Sun workstations to sniff via software either, but feel free to run NetBSD on your Sun just to make them recompile it anyways.
I myself ran on a Sun Ultra 10 at home till I sold it for this dual G4. They can be somewhat palatable workstations.
Step #5, serial:
If you really want to mess with their heads, set the machine up to have video output, but take serial input. Get an old dumb terminal out, put it on the other side of the desk, and pump in some text.
When they come in a few weeks later and wonder why the keyboard plugged into your PS/2 port didn't log anything, they may wonder what the heck is going on.
And somehow I doubt they've got a nise Wyse compatible keyboard logger anyways.
Enough silly ideas, time to go back to sleep.
2m keystrokes? Well, how many times do you hit space while paging through the alt.binaries.erotica.* groups? :)
I'm just imagining the FBI guy who's job it is to eat cheesy puffs and drink coke while making as much mess as possible over the new keyboard to be 'conditioned', plus adding the requisite assortment of hair (human and cat), plus a layer of dust. What a job. :>
Hmm... my keyboard is a mess.
Delphis
Geez - you can buy them on ebaY for $50.
Perhaps the fbi should hurry to quash:
http://www.keykatcher.com/howitworks.htm ???
Maybe they're not willing to admit that they squandered millions of our tax $$$ to reinvent something that has been available from china for years?
Shit - if you have physical access to the guy's keyboard, any sixth-grade kid should be able to snag the keystrokes with a PIC or SBC?
;)
if you're not interested in nytimes registration, this story is also available here.
Methinks you're all giving this guy too much credit... What are the odds that Scarfo the Con is actually intelligent? (ie. he could find and recognize a keystroke logger of any kind -- most people I know are *afraid* to look behind their computers, and a software logger ideally wouldn't give any indication it was running.)
Um..... tracert just prints out what hops are taken to reach a computer. If you want the physcal location of the computer, you'll have to get the records from the isp, and the phone copmany. And that's assuming wireless wasn't used
You're keyboard sounds like mine! .. maybe the FBI swapped them? :>
.. I wonder just how many keyboards the FBI would need to buy in order to have every make and model in every keymap available .. hmm...
The one currently in place on my home computer has a UK keymap too (since I moved from the UK to the US)
Delphis
To complement this fabulous new key spying technology, the FBI is now actively using special tracking devices to find the locations of certain computers. Although the FBI was unavailable for comment, keylogs of sensitive FBI laptops were obtained from an anonymous source.
In analyzing the data received from the laptops, it is obvious that some sort of high-tech encryption has been used, since none of the information obtained contains any human-readable content. A snippet of the data used to control this high-tech tracking mechanism was released to the press earlier today. The following line from the logs seems to control this amazing new tracking technology:
c:\msdos\tracert.exe
Application "please don't close this" has caused a general exception in module "Flowers By Irine"
If this problem continues, please contact your software vendor
This is sadly funny.
Yes, he can. He can also dismiss the entire case.
Assuming the government doesn't convince him to rescind his order, they'll probably appeal it to the next higher court. (Note that there's about a 20-day window between the deadline for in-camera submission of reasons not to reveal the info and when the public filing is due.)
Prosecutors know better than to stonewall judges. Judges tend to get testy if their orders aren't obeyed, and they can throw people in jail!
The device could be hidden inside the keyboard, which would require the agent to physically disassemble the keyboard to install the device.
So use a Sun. Unpleasant and obvious things happen if a keyboard's pulled and reconnected...
Could it not be some way of trapping the electronic signals remotely? I remember hearing about this somewhere, not sure if was a conspircy theory, a movie, a book, or what....
Theoretically though, your keyboard emits a signal (albeit through a cable) back to your computer. If you had something sensitive enough, could you not trap those signals and record them? No encryption to worry about, no sniffing on the network or packets to deal with, just pure, raw data from the source!
My bad. I haven't looked at them for awhile, I was recalling this entirely from memory.
USB Keyboards would only have 4 wires, ground, hot, data+ and data-. If USB Keyboards all work in the same way (which I'm assuming, since BIOSes have an USB Keyboard option, so it doesn't appear as if they need seperate drivers) then what I said about AT and PS/2 keyboards also holds true for USB keyboards.
Now, for the off-topic part of this:
What my plans are to do (probably over this boring Minnesota winter) is to get an old cocktail style arcade machine, gut it, throw in a stripped computer monitor and a hacked case to support a motherboard, and then take a keyboard splitting circuit (available on the net), and plug a regular keyboard in it, for maintainance, and the other end will go to a specially made circuit, home-etched, created by stealing the design/encoder from an existing keyboard, so I don't have to pay $100+ for Happ's solution. Since the keyboards I've examined have a small (about 2" x 4") circuit board, and runs the input grid on two sheets of plastic, I can examine the circuit board to remake the circuits, and trace the grid for the button press info. Other fun parts of this project include hacking a mouse to be a trackball (arcade style), and breaking apart a cheap joystick for an analog controller, or else making one from scratch. Oh, and probably going with DOS for the OS, since its MAME friendly, although Linux would work, with a few patches for a journelling filesystem. :)
We used some similar SW on some labs I used to look after at university. It could log keystrokes, and also give the master operator control of the desktop remotely.
We just used to set it on scan to see if any of the kids were looking at porn, if they were, we'd pop up a message on their screen and freak them out!
It would also tell you how many WPM the admin staff were doing, so we'd place bets on who was doing the most. Stopped this when we started deliberatly messing with them to try and win!
Actually, they dident need to bug the typewriters at all. They just needed an audio feed of people doing the typing on the old "ball" stye of IBM Selectric typewriters. The Selectrics had a round ball that had all the type one it and it returned home after each key press. The KGB was able to determin the what letter the typist pressed buy measuring the amount of time between a key-press and the 'thunk' of the ball hitting the ribbon and paper.
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
Basically, tempest eavesdroppers exploit the electromagnetic radiation generated by things like your monitor, UTP Ethernet, serial cables... in some cases the radiation thrown into the shortwave band is broadcast fairly significant distances... also advanced techniques -- such as irraditing a building with a certain frequency of electromagnetic radition -- prove that it's been possible to pluck individual instructions of a CPU.
The most simple form of tempest eavesdropping is reconstructing the image displayed on your CRT, however, it would also be possible to grab keystrokes from a PS/2 cable (or your pin code from the serial cable that connects the keypad of an ATM)...
Actualy CRT eavesdropping is fairly simple... all you really need to get started is an old B&W TV with manual sync signal adjustment (the sync signal on a monitor usually isn't powerful enough for "home-made" [i.e. crude] eavesdropping devices to detect-- so in order to get a coherent picture you need to manually control sync.)
Do a search on Google for tempest radiation-- you'll find all sorts of interesting things... Check out also Tempest for Eliza -- it's a neat functional demonstration. With it, you can use your monitor to broadcast music on the shortwave spectrum. It's sort of eerie actually.
BRx.
Life after capitalism? The participatory economics project
No sh*t. If I were to come home and find someone breaking my computer--or really, just in my home--he'd be subjected to Great Unpleasantness to the nth degree. Where nth degree is defined as multiple .22 in. holes in his head. When did the US sink so low as to allow pigs to break into a man's home--his castle--and listen to his private conversations? I know that it's been going on for a long time; I just wish it were legal to retaliate. If we could issue pigs speeding tickets, or fire on them, or even scream obscenities at them without being arrested, it'd be nice. They are such despicable uentermenschen.
> If this new bugging critter from the FBI is not a violation of our constitutional rights, then they should be able to describe it to the judge in such a manner that they will be able to keep using it.
Maybe the judge should just have one installed at the FBI HQ, so he can see for himself what the FBI are saying about it.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Maybe the guy was using a wireless keyboard and they don't want to reveal that fact in case it gives the game away and all their other targets go back to the wired kind :-)
-- Vagnerr - (www.vagnerr.com) Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.
The Russians, the Chinese, and every other country that routinely run 'agents' against the US of A. As the chief counter-intelligence of the USA, the FBI is probably using these things against all sort of confirmed and suspected foreign agents. And now the FBI'll be forced to explain exactly what the thing is, how it works, what it looks like, and a lot of 'spies' are going to check their computers....
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
Its rather unlikely. Chances are good that while they're breaking into your house, someone else is following you and can easily warn whoever is there to get out if you choose to come home earlier.
Of course, someone ELSE could come by and surprise them all.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
As someone who used to be in the "industry", I can say that the FBI is either way behind the times or full of shit. Most keyboards generate a lot of tempest. Some rather basic test equipment, some software and some patients is all it takes. This is OLD technology. Why do you think there is such a thing as tempest free keyboards? Considering that many hobbiests should be able to handel doing this, any foriegn power, most certainly can do it. Back in the mid eighties, revieling the techniques might have degraded National Security, but I doubt it as most classified material should have been being processed on tempest secure equipment. Speaking of keyboards, mine is a piece of shit.
The device could be hidden inside the keyboard, which would require the agent to physically disassemble the keyboard to install the device.
Yes, so what? It is easy to open keyboards. On the other hand there is usually no need to so and nobody (except the curious, like me) does it. With portable soldering equipment the installation of a bug like this takes 5 minutes, just attach 5 (or was it 4?) wires.
This is not difficult! If the keyboard type is knowen in advance the agent doing the installation can practice before and get the time down even further. The wires can also be clipped on for a traceless later removal.
However the best job would be to hide the additional components so that they are not easy to find. This could be done by mounting the additional SMD EEPROM and, e.g., PIC microcontroller, below the original microprocessor, maybe even in holes cut into its case. This would need a very careful inspection to detect it.
Of course the perfect job would be to get some hardware manufacturer to hide the additional chips in the casing of the keyboard microcontroller. Then only destructive search would have a chance of detecting it. Or relable a microcontroller with the same casing and the additional functionality to resemble the keyboard controller.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted and ignored otherwise.
This means that the Judge wants to see for himself exactly how the FBI device thing works. (The original government description was "gobbledegook".) From the rest of the order, however, it sounds to me like that the Judge does not believe a communications intercept has occured unless the FBI overheard Scarfo talking via a modem or other Internet connection.
In other words, IMHO it appears that the Judge is actually leaning against Scarfo, but doesn't quite understand the technology enough to make a decision. Remember, the law very narrowly defines a "communication" when talking about wiretapping...
I suppose it's what I get for using a calculator and not thinking about weather or not the awnser makes sense. If you count each char as 6.5 bits (stadard typeable keyspace is 96 chars) you get 227.5 bits which is still a major pain to crack.
Nah just imagene a spook who just broke into your room pulling a trolley behing him with not only a huge range of keyboards (including the many Imac clone colored ones) with diffrend keymaps, and a small fridge containing beferages used in the "identical coke-staining procedure"...
Unless they are tapping a regular aol user, then they just phone "hello, aol helpdesk here, we detected some problems with the urls your browser sends and need to know....Do the first keys on your keyboard spell wqerty or azerty or dvorak?"
I was tired and mis-calculated. Just a stupid mistake.
On the very FIRST PAGE is this link to what appears to be what we're talking about.
3 Minutes, $80, how much did we pay for the FBI version?
-Ben
PS: Is it just me or has /. gotten SLOOOWW these past few weeks?
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
This isn't a troll or anything, just something that I've never heard of happening, and I was wondering what the law states in this regard.
So use a Sun. Unpleasant and obvious things happen if a keyboard's pulled and reconnected...
:-)=)
You assume the Sun is running while the keyboard is modified. There is acertain risk in disconnecting a keyboard from a running PC as well (but it is doable). The main difference is that a Sun will usually be continously running (and might have a long boot time), while the PC is usually switched off. The problem of disassembling a PC keyboard (or a Sun keyboard) while it is still plugged into a running system however is pretty small and this is an option for installation on a running Sun
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted and ignored otherwise.
Scarfo: "Shit, what's this little icon in the corner...I've never seen that before."
FBI #1: "Damnit, he's onto us! Pull the plug!"
FBI #2: "No! It's okay. We embedded it into the Virtual Vixen (tm?) EXE. He'll play with it all day and never figure it out."
Scarfo: "Oh wow, when did I get this? This is great!"
FBI #1 and #2 simultaneously: "MUA HA HA HA"
The way I see it, the keylogger could either be a software or hardware device. It may require that an agent break into the Bad Guy's premises to install the bug. Then again it may not...
If it was a software device, it would probably be some sort of virus or trojan horse that would sit silently & log keystrokes, and transmit them to the FBI at periodic intervals. There are the issues of compatibility - there are over a dozen different varieties of Windows in general use, as well as Linux, BeOS, BSD, etc. That would require multiple versions of the software, all carefully crafted to hide itself from anyone from a casual luser to an experienced computer security expert (what the FBI likes to refer to as a "hacker".) Somewhere along the line it would probably be detected and deactivated.
The hardware approach has the advantage of being OS neutral, and there are only a few varieties of keyboard interfaces that need to be handled. The device could be hidden inside the keyboard, which would require the agent to physically disassemble the keyboard to install the device. This would take a lot of time, and have several risks: The agent could be caught in the act, which is made more likely by the extra time taking the keyboard apart. Also, the agent could break the keyboard, which would make the Bad Guys aware that something suspicious was happening.
Putting the device inside the computer would be easier - most computers are designed to be opened & serviced with little more than a screwdriver. However, the agent still has to spend time disassembling & reassembling equipment, with risk of breaking the computer or being caught and subject to Great Unpleasantness. Putting the bug outside of the computer (glued to the underside of the desk or attached to a cable) would be too easy to detect, especially when dealing with Evil Russian Hackerz(TM).
The best way would be to use a bakery van full of TEMPEST gear to listen to the stray signals coming from the computer. The gear would be able to listen to keystrokes, as well as record everything that is displayed on the computer's screen. I suspect the feds don't want this revealed because then the Bad Guys could send thugs to kill the agents in the van, then they would be able to play with all the neat toys inside and come up with countermeasures.
Meldroc, Waster of Electrons
Hey, you got a F-i-r-s-t P-o-s-t and didn't even put the obligatory f/p at the bottom of your message! /. mature?
Since when is
Your comment is really funny tho. Here, let me continue it:
Scarfo's 9 year old son: Hey, daddy, what's that icon with the FBI logo on it?
Scarfo: Uh, it's a buisiness spreadsheet database locator accessory. Don't touch it.
Kid: You mean it's where you keep your porn?
Scarfo *thwaps head* Damn kids. Only bad people look at porn, son. I'm not a bad person.
FBI Agents (together): Yeeaahhh riiighhht....
Kid: Oh, ok, so it's just the keylogger the FBI put on your machine?
Scarfo: Of course, what did I say it was? *mutters* Kids are so funny these days...
This
I'm glad to see that this judge isn;t buying into the FBI's lies. No matter that involves the internal police actions of a country should be secret. The FBI, ATF, etc., should not have any right to claim national security.
Hopefully, this judge's courageous ruling will slow America's descent into a police state. The very idea that the FBI is conducting warrantless searches is contrary to everything Americans have fought and died for.
No comment at this time
the FBI sent the keylogger to him in an e-mail message along the lines of "I send you this file in order to have your advice." They couldn't be held accountable as he willingly opened it.
Nah.. the FBI embed web cams in the monitors at manufacturing time. This is quite a common trick that no-one knows about, and they use it in TV's and computer monitors all over the world. They lose everything as soon as people find out and start disabling them, or typing with the keyboard out of sight of the monitor.
There are only two things in this world that smell like fish. And one of them's fish...
Good God! Stop the presses! Does a member of the legal community (and in this case a judge) perhaps understand true legal implications of arguably abusive technological practices by the government? I would truly be interested in reading a bio of this judge. After searching through google, I could not find any relevant information. Anyone?
"There ought to be limits to freedom"
give me a break, give me 10 min, a C compiler and a text editor and I'll make you one, lol.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
The obvious solution is to create a very small keyboard wedge, similar to the KeyGhost, but much thinner. Obviously anyone who pulls out their keyboard plug to check would find it easily (unless it were made truely tiny, maybe <1mm thick), BUT, unless the target hacker happened to be dissassembling his computer, he probably would not notice it for quite some time.
Hell, even a regular keyghost would probably go unnoticed until he happened to look behind the computer. I'm fairly security aware, and I strip and rebuild my systems as often as a typical hacker, but I don't go checking for key loggers every time I type in my pass phrase.
check out the ZupaZekret deweiz at www.keyghost.com. Found in Germany by www.sicherheitstechnik-orth.de.
car
But I'm getting the impression that's not possible. Which should tell you a lot.
just that the judge is taking submissions.
The device could be hidden inside the keyboard, which would require the agent to physically disassemble the keyboard to install the device.
They could have swapped the keyboard with an identical model that had a keyghost or similar device installed. I'm sure that at least 99 out of 100 people wouldn't be able to tell the difference, as long as the keyboard is less than ~6 months old, and doesn't have any identifying cracks/marks. By doing this, they would greatly reduce the time needed to install the device.
When's the last time you looked at your keyboard cable? Or noticed if your keyboard got a little cleaner, almost like new?
This was mentioned on slashdot a year ago.
A company called Keyghost makes a small device that you place either inside a keyboard, or in between the keyboard and the computer that will log several kilobytes of keystrokes.
I would assume this is similar to the super secret technology that the FBI used.
my nick is zeedotcom...but my e-mail is slow and I can't get at my password which I forgot...doh
The system that the FBI typically uses attaches between the keyboard connector and the computer. It is out of sight, at the back of the computer.
/. article on it a little while back. The site linked would only sell to approved governmental organizations.
There was a
... that invisible ink from the Shreddies box, eh!
It is physical, it physically hooks into keyboard stream. Its internal to the case. It records data on flashram, which the fbi can only read once they've seized the equipment. They can not read the keystrokes from remote. This is only one device, they have all sorts of stuff.
On August 7, the court ordered the government to submit to the defense and the court a report "detailing how the key logger device functions" by August 31.
Ummm... At the last Vegas security expo, I picked up a keylogger (8k) offered by some company... Plug keylogger into computer, plug keyboard into keylogger...
It looks like a simple torroid RF blocker on a keyboard cable at first glance... Then again, given the amount of dust, mummified donuts, dead , cables, and cat hair - I never look at my keyboard port anyway...
On disassembling the keyboard to install the device: I can just about guarantee you that the FBI would know what type of keyboard this guy had, would buy one exactly like it - take it apart at their shop, install their junk, and then swap 'em so he wouldn't know... They don't take anything apart right there - that's the best way to get discovered and killed...
A while ago (mid 80's, I think), it was discovered that typewriters had been bugged by the Russians at the American Embassy in Moscow. Apparently, the KGB had managed to stick a low powered transmission device under each key of the typewriter. This allowed them to 'see' what the person using the machine wrote....
This is probably just a variation of that.
Chris.
-- I don't have a cool sig.
Taking the PC or keyboard apart would be too difficult. And attaching something to the keyboard cable would be too obvious. I think what it is is an actual KEY. Think about it... a key's hollow... They could fit some tiny electronics in a key, and in a matter of seconds pry a key off the keyboard and replace it with thier key with the little "bug" in it. This bug, being so close to the keyboard might be able to read the eletronic impulses of the keypresses more easily. And then it could transmit the data or store it to be retrieved later. Since it's so easy to detect bugs that transmit stuff, it probably would store the info for retreival later.
"Certainly, your honor, that information is right here on my laptop...somewhere...hey, anybody seen..."
Be part of the world's largest collaborative work of art: http://www.paintthemoon.org
Why not modify your keyboard and motherboard so the signaling voltage is around 20000 volts? Any device they attach will be fried. Of course, in the end, when (in)justice catches up, you will just have to pay for it...
Geekizoid: The Small Shiny Things Network ©
Gobble a dick!
That would be a miniature TEMPEST device. It would be very hard to design and manufacture. In the end it would be cheaper to use regular TEMPEST machinery in a van parked down the street or just brute force the password with a Cray.
Geekizoid: The Small Shiny Things Network ©
Gobble a dick!
The order has two parts, the first of which orders the government to
This part has an August 31st deadline, and will become part of the public record (Page 5).But the second part gives the government 10 days to provide
That's the in-camera submission.So basically it works like this: The judge has told the government, "You've got until August 31 to reveal how the key logger works. But I'll give you ten days to come up with a reason for me to change my mind. And because that reason might have national-security implications, I'll allow you to tell me privately."
It appears to me that the issue here is that the FBI went looking for Scarfo's passphrase, but in the process may have gathered a lot more information. And if it intentionally or inadvertently intercepted communications, that requires a different [more restrictive] kind of warrant:
So here the judge says that if the key logger did pick up more than the passphrase, there may be grounds for tossing the evidence because it was equivalent to a wiretap, and the original warrant didn't authorize that. And that he needs to know how the key logger works so that he can make sense of the "gobbledygook", thus revealing what besides the passphrase was actually intercepted. Whether the logger utilized the modem is not important, only whether it intercepted communication.--------
Quality AC posts since 1999!
how their toy works. ze germans?
Got Freedom?
Thinking?
At least they have the $$$ to fight for our freedom. So they break a few laws and kill a few people. At least in the end we might be a safer society to live in? Hard to say.... but at least they can afford to fight for us (even if it is for their own gain)
They could get away with an older keyboard if they've already scanned the room with a video camera and bodged up a replacement keyboard.
They did it with the desk lamp in the opener of Season 3 of The Soprano's and I believe everything I see on TV...
Consultancy: If you're not part of the solution, there's money to be made in prolonging the problem
I don't know about the exact adapter the FBI was using, but I have researched keyboards for emulation projects (hacking a keyboard to get many possible inputs, etc).
Most keyboards have a "grid" made of two rows of wires, to simply put it, a horizontal row, and a vertical row (which isn't exactly true, but is very close to how it works). When you press a button, you close the circuit between one of the vertical rows and one of the horizontal rows. Now this is sent to a small circuit in the keyboard that is basically a decoder chip, that tranfers the specific horizontal row/vertical row combination into a key. This small circuit is usually on a circuit board, and is custom to each type of keyboard. So far, we are finding it difficult to put a keystroke logger into the keyboard. However, the decoder circuit is hooked up to the cable that sends it to the computer. There are either 5 or 6 wires used (I believe 5, one is extra), and there is enough space inside most motherboards that it would be possible to put a small circuit in it. All you need to do is to tap into the wires inside of the keyboard and you have a bug that can install in a few minutes, and is undetectable unless you take the keyboard apart.
Then again, I see other posters talking about an adapter that fits on the end of the plug, in the back of the computer, which would work, but is an inelegant, and very easily found solution. Inside the computer would work also, but would have to interface to the back of the ps/2 adapter, or to motherboard traces, and I'm guessing the grounded case would hinder transmissions of signals. OTOH, cases are easier to take apart, and there is usually a lot more space.
2,000,000 - Uh huh. In my case that'd be good for what, three days? ;-)
Oh, and what if the space bar gets stuck or something?
Sure it's long term guys.
I looked at the bottom of my keyboard, and it has 6 screws holding it together. You'd need a fair amount of time to install it, plus you always leave scratches on the screw heads.
My guess it that its software.
A probably a replacement for the windows keyboard driver. If you run BSD, I think the spooks are out of luck.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you