Keyloggers Now Classified Technology

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."

Comments

Abuse of power

[sourcehunter]

I'm sorry, I don't care WHAT kind of technology you use against a criminal to gather evidence, it should be open to scrutiny.

I believe the same to be true of the Carnivore system, even though I readily defend its use as legitimate.

What if they classified the tape and tape recorder they used to tape a conversation - no one would be able to check the tape to see if it was or could have been altered!

Re:Abuse of power

[JCCyC]

Bingo. If this sticks, nobody is safe. Imagine: they can type any kind of fake e-mail, and then say it was keylogged thru their "classified technology".

"Who'll be today's suckers, Mr. Director?"
"Let's make Ralph Nader a pedophile, Noam Chomsky a crack dealer and David Touretzky... lessee... a terrorist from Hamas. No, better, Tim McVeigh's secret accomplice!"

Evidence would not be admissable in UK courts

[new500]

. . .

Must make this short (as there's a god long debate behind what follows) but this would make inadmissable any collected evidence in a UK court.

This would be because there is then no person or other body of evidence available to question regards veracity.

Evidence rules here very tough, and the case would be almost immediately thrown out.

This is tantamount to claiming the Ivisible Man as witness and the prosecutor or plaintiff claiming they cannot bring him for cross examination because they cannot find him.

The anaology is the same, if something cannot be shown to court, it may not bear witness.

This is the first basic rule of civilisation and law over hearsay, rumour and superstition.

Re:Whats wrong with that?

[camusflage]

If refusing is helping catching bad guys, I'm all for it.

"Those who would trade their essential Liberty for a perceived temporary Security deserve neither Liberty nor Security" --Ben Franklin

If refusing is lopping the legs off the constitution, I'm against it. Right now, without answering questions, we can only assume that they're hiding something. If they thought it would stand on its own merit, they should've applied for the wiretap order. Of course, the judge would ask if they'd see him register for access to NY Times articles, or a Slashdot registration, or even a flame email that was typed but subsequently cancelled and thus never sent. My guess is that since the answer would be "Yes" to all those questions, they knew a wiretap order wouldn't be signed, as the information gathered would be beyond the boundaries of the order.

What they SHOULD have done was take the PGP source, write in a routine to either store or forward the passphrase, compile it, and tote that to the federal judge, and apply for the wiretap with THAT rather than something they bought from a spam mail about tracking your kid online. I would expect that they could get a judge to buy in on that since it would (and could) only intercept the information they were seeking.

Also, you're presupposing that all people they "catch" are "bad guys". Sadly, such is not the case, but we won't even begin to get into that.