Keyloggers Now Classified Technology

Posted by michael on Saturday August 25, 2001 @05:24AM from the trust-us-we're-the-government dept.

general_re writes: "The New York Times (free reg required blah blah blah) is reporting that the Department of Justice is still refusing to turn over details of how the keystroke loggers used against Nicky Scarfo worked, claiming that revealing how it works "would render it useless in future investigations" as well as claiming that it is classified information. Nevermind that this also prevents his lawyers from evaluating or attacking the credibility or accuracy of the evidence arrayed against him. One interesting question raised is whether it's always been classified, or if they're retroactively classifying it in order to avoid revealing how they work."

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Whats wrong with that? by codeforprofit2 · 2001-08-25 05:41 · Score: 0, Flamebait

If refusing is helping catching bad guys, I'm all for it.
They shouldn't reveal how they got the password by andi75 · 2001-08-25 05:45 · Score: 0, Flamebait

Here's why:
The keystrokes optained where used to recover the passwords that protected the valuable data. So the password doesn't need to count as evidence, only the data that was recovered. Their keystroke logger could have been a hidden camera, for all we know, or they simply guessed the pass phrase and got lucky.
Revealing that they guessed the password (Don Corleone's daughter's birthday) could put further use in jeopardy, since criminals would actually start to use *clever* passwords!