Unfortunately, people have forgotten what the thin end of a wedge looks like. Example: the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 provided that security personnel at the level of "Chief Inspector of Police" or above could provide authorisation to monitor communications for the prevention of "serious crime or terrorism."
Actual legislation, as it now stands: officials in town halls up and down the country use the same powers with little oversight, to monitor people for offences as trivial as lying on their school application form, fly-tipping and (soon) minor traffic misdemeanours such as parking on a yellow line.
Unfortunately, we're not alone: this is an EU measure, and other countries such as India, Australia and the US are, let's face it, just as culpable and opposed to genuine online freedom.
BTW, I'd like to see them use these techniques (virus-laden emails, key-loggers, wireless hacking) to get into any sufficiently tech-savvy user's computer.
Key loggers can be tough to beat. While getting a software key-logger past me would be laborious (set BIOS password-reset jumper on motherboard, enable CD boot in BIOS, boot from rescue CD, figure out my RAID settings so you can mount my root partition, install key-logger and kernel rootkit to hide the process, restore what my desktop looked like so that I don't notice), it's pretty likely that I wouldn't notice a physical one before it was too late.
There are lots of laptop keyboard loggers. The real convert ones embed them in the keyboard by putting it between some connector or another. Laptop and desktop. You just need 10 minutes if your good.
There are probably key-loggers designed to be placed inside laptops, but, not being a black-hat, I've never seen or looked for one. In any case, it'd be a lot more difficult. The cop would have to be trained in how to perform the installation in a reasonable period of time.
Actual legislation, as it now stands: officials in town halls up and down the country use the same powers with little oversight, to monitor people for offences as trivial as lying on their school application form, fly-tipping and (soon) minor traffic misdemeanours such as parking on a yellow line.
Unfortunately, we're not alone: this is an EU measure, and other countries such as India, Australia and the US are, let's face it, just as culpable and opposed to genuine online freedom.
BTW, I'd like to see them use these techniques (virus-laden emails, key-loggers, wireless hacking) to get into any sufficiently tech-savvy user's computer.