The Federal Government, namely the DEA, is using internet era tactics to fight cyber crime. In what has to be one of the more interesting drug busts in recent history, the DEA used a keylogger to “wiretap” the computers of accused drug manufacturers in Escondido, California.

The office that was tapped is under scrutiny for being a front for an Ecstasy manufacturing ring. This type of surveillance received a warrant to do this because the accused used PGP and Hushmail to guard their email from prying eyes.

The DEA broke into the office and planted this keylogger so that they could find the pass phrases needed to decrypt the groups communication.

Pretty Good Privacy

Pretty Good Privacy is the web privacy and encryption standard developed by Philip Zimmermann in 1991. The short version of how this technology works is that the sender encrypts a message, using a public key (part of a pair of keys). A second key (session key) turns the plain-text document into encrypted text.

At the recipents end, both keys are used to decrypt the data. Since both keys are needed and the entire transaction is a garbled mess unless it is between the authorized sender and recipient, PGP has been the internet’s gold standard for personal encryption for quite some time.

Hushmail is a service that makes use of PGP for all of its transactions, making it extremely difficult to get any idea about the communications being sent between the California office and those who they were dealing with.

Web 2.0 Roundup

It’s great that the federal government is making better use technology. I must admit though, a keylogger planted inside of an office building is a bit more brute force than you would hope. Either way, this is just another sign that technology is creeping its way into all aspects of our lives and even the typically slowest moving segments of our society are learning to use it effectively.

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