According to the Sydney Morning Herald, as a result of the Surveillance Devices Act, federal and state police now have the ability to install "surveillance technologies" (including common spyware apps like keystroke loggers). Lovely. There goes a whole lot of civil rights down the drain.
While it requires a warrant and is intended to be used for offences with a maximum sentence of three years, it's still a big slap in the face for user privacy.
One issue I have is, if the police install one of their programs onto my computer (not that they would… I suspect they would only be targeting Windows PCs) and their software caused the computer to crash (as "spyware" commonly does), causing me to lose a document/presentation/etc that I've been working on, I'd be REALLY irate.
In a more extreme case, what if the software caused the machine to malfunction or delete documents I had been working on, which would result in me having to spend time and money recovering or doing them again? Can I sue for damages? I doubt it.
What about sensitive information? If I'm dealing with personal (whether it's medical, credit, corporate, etc) or sensitive information, how do we know that the police won't do anything with that information? With that constant stream of data being sent to the police, what stops some other hacker from monitoring that connection and grabbing the sensitive information? Not a whole lot…
Possibly the scariest thing about all of this:
However, Electronic Frontiers is concerned that key-logging software can even record words written and then deleted or changed and thoughts that are not intended for communication.
Ummm… "thoughtcrime", anyone?
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