A virus hit computers across the Vancouver school board Wednesday, locking accounts in schools and offices.

VSB spokesman David Weir said the district-wide virus was annoying, but didn’t disrupt academic or administrative business.

“It was a nuisance virus that caused challenges, but it’s not a destructive virus,” he said. “No student data is at risk.”

Posted by Justin Payton in Adware, Spyware and Trojans at 17:21

An interesting little situation has cropped up across the pond in the UK, where it became public news late last week that new legislation makes it permissible for law enforcement types to use spyware to look-in on the citizenry without first obtaining a court-ordered mandate to do so.

According to the BBC, the law was passed based on encouragement to adopt such practices across the governments of EU states.

Now, in a country where a state roughly the size of the entire U.K. - California - rose up to put a stop to a potential privacy exposure when someone merely suggested putting RFID tags on student IDs, one can't imagine that such a law would sneak into the books anytime soon (though, Patriot Act....). However, the maelstrom of controversy that has emerged in the U.K. over the new law is interesting food for thought for those of us over here States-side.

Let's consider the issue for a moment... what are the benefits?

So, conceivably if cops are allowed to legally use spyware to infiltrate the computers of suspected criminals, they could:

• Head off potential crimes or terrorist attacks sooner
• Solve crimes faster
• Better understand how criminals work together
• Unfold money laundering schemes
• Trace smaller crimes back to larger organizations
• Catch more cyber-criminals

And those are just a few things that immediately come to mind. There are likely a million more advantages that someone in law enforcement or intelligence could cook up, and far more complex angles at that.

And now, on the flip side, what are the risks?

• Assumption of guilt before proof
• Flagrant abuse
• Total loss of personal privacy!

I mean, hey, I want the government and police to catch as many baddies as possible, but putting spyware on the computer of a "suspected" criminal to gather info on "suspected" activities? There are terrifying implications across the board.

It would seem that police in this nation are finally coming up to speed with the use of technology in crime, and law enforcement, but one can only imagine what the abuses of such a powerful tool might be if not at least checked by the need for something like a search warrant. Again, I'm ignorant to anything but TV law enforcement, but is it really that hard to gain the court's permission to follow known criminals? Are there so few of those types to follow that we have time to peek in on just about anyone?

The UK law does require that the LEO using the spyware must have some established grounds for doing so, but, with the number of cases we see dismissed each year in the U.S. based on unlawful search and seizure, etc., could we really expect any strict adherence to any related guidelines? I'm not sure that we could expect cops to do anything less than use the ability to load spyware to whatever extent possible, because they're really just trying to do their jobs 99 percent of the time, I'm sure, and they have to make the most of the tools that we give them.

But, the mind boggles at the potential for misuse, and, as pointed out in the U.K. online trade pub TechRadar, privileged insiders have already used the U.K.'s national Police computer to do things like spy on estranged lovers, pass out classified information to newspapers and stalk people who don't clean up after their pets.

Posted by Justin Payton in Adware, Spyware and Trojans at 08:07