Magic Lantern: The Not So Bright Truth |
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| Author:
| Prothis
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| Submitted: |
31-Jan-2004 10:14:18 |
| Imported From: |
zZine (original author: Prothis)
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| Unless you have been living under a rock for the last few months you'd know what Magic Lantern, Carnivore and all that are about.
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In case you have been I'll do a brief rundown for you.
Our good old friends at the FBI have been working hard on some wonderful new software for us to complain about.
The First one being the Carnivore Project
Carnivore (sounds nasty doesn't it? - well it is) also known as DCS1000, is an FBI "Wiretapping" tool. It was first publicly reported on July 11, 2000. The technical details of it aren't too well known (Because its the FBI) but what we do know is that the FBI installs a Carnivore "Black Box" into the Router of a suspects ISP. Its primary purpose is to intercept large amounts of emails and other electronic conversations, while not tampering with it in any way.
Now onto the Magic Lantern
Our friends at the FBI is also developing a virus as a part of the Enhanced Carnivore Project, that can be inserted onto a suspects computer and obtain encryption keys. Magic Lantern is also capable of logging the suspect's keystrokes. The virus can be sent via email, like many crackers do nowadays.
While Magic Lantern is not as large a threat than Carnivore, it still poses a threat to users rights to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures of information.
"Malicious code is malicious code," said Graham Cluely, senior technology consultant for Sophos Anti-Virus "If a customer suspects they may be under surveillance and sends a Trojan horse to us, we're going to provide protection against it."
source: ABC News.
One of the largest risks in Magic Lantern is if someone could obtain the code, they could alter it to resend to mass users and obtain encryption keys and other data from other users for themselves. Unfortunately due to the FBI, there is almost no technical information about Magic Lantern available to the public. However if you want to read more information, i recommend you take a look at http://www.epic.org.
This article was written by: Russ
This article was originally published by CyberArmy.net in the CyberArmy Library.
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