A court case, recently, has provided a glimpse into the law and order tactics used by federal agents to deal with encryption issues. The Federal agents broke into the suspect home and office and implanted a key logger software to spy on the suspect. The federal agent involved in this case persuaded a judge to allow him to break into the office of a suspect and copied data off the suspects hard disks and at the same let loose a key logger spyware into the suspect's computer. The office was suppose to a front for manufacturing Ecstasy.
The act was justified by the DEA agent, stating that the suspect was using PGP encrypted emails and encrypted mail service via Hushmail.com. The Federal agents monitored the real time access and keystrokes of the suspect, remotely. PacBell, now AT&T, loaned their DSL line to be used by defendants. This is not the first time that the law and enforcement agencies, key loggers have been used before, and in one instance was found out by the suspect and had been disabled by the suspect.
The key logger used by these law enforcement agencies is known as "Magic Lantern", which can be installed remotely, exploiting the vulnerabilities of the operating systems, with out having the agents to be physically present at the computer site to install the key logger application, by breaking and entering in to the premises of the suspect. Key loggers now a days are illegal off course, there have been many students and other people who have been indicted for using them on public access systems or using them tool out information with out the consent of the people getting key logged.
