July 20th, 2007
When police plant spyware, what does anti-spyware do?
In the cat and mouse game of the Internet, the murky area of spyware vs. anti-spyware isn’t always clear. Now that law enforcement is using spyware to monitor suspects’ computers, can the government stop anti-spyware companies from nuking policeware?
News.com surveyed 13 anti-spyware vendors, all of whom stated that their policy is to detect police spyware. Nine out the 13 companies had received a court order to stop detecting police spyware. A few of the companies agreed that they would whitelist policeware if asked. The rest of the companies ignored the question entirely.
The prospect of spyware as a legitimate police activity — with the background of warrantless wiretapping by the NSA — is raising some serious questions about how much free rein government should have to electronically turn over rocks. The recent NSA wiretap scandals has left many people worried that the federal government isn’t going to bother with obtaining search warrants anyway.
So far, there have been no known court orders to anti-spyware companies asking them to not detect policeware.
Ars Technica takes a civil libertarian take to the question.
The recent NSA wiretapping scandal shows that the federal government is not always going to bother obtaining search warrants in the first place, and considers casting a wide net of surveillance to be an acceptable method of counter-terrorism, despite the fact that it is of dubious value as such. As for court orders to anti-spyware companies to not detect policeware, no such orders have been confirmed and Kevin Bankston, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told CNET that “the government would be pushing the boundaries of the law if it attempted to obtain such an order.” However, this too could be circumvented by using the Wiretap Act.
