Scanning your hard drive: the next step to the fascist state

and from germany, where else...?

[A]long with several other European countries, Germany is seeking authority to plant secret Trojan viruses into the computers of suspects that could scan files, photos, diagrams and voice recordings, record every keystroke typed and possibly even turn on webcams and microphones in an attempt to gain knowledge of attacks before they happen.

[...]

"If you spy on my telephone calls, you can never have as big a picture of me as if you can read my hard drive," said Constanze Kurz, an activist with the Berlin-based hacker organization the Chaos Computer Club, which has pledged to find and publicize the first government Trojan.

"My communications, my private photos, my private films, all of my research. And if you install that Trojan on the computer, you can look not only at this data on the hard drive, but you can see what I'm typing, you can collect my thoughts as I'm typing them in," she said. "If you give me your computer for one hour, I will know everything about you."

Already, Romania, Cyprus, Latvia and Spain have laws that allow "online searches," according to a report from Germany's Interior Ministry, which conducted an informal survey in Europe. Switzerland and Slovenia appear to also allow such searches, and Sweden is in the process of adopting similar legislation, the report said.

In the U.S., where battles are being fought over warrantless surveillance of telephone and Internet communications, the FBI is known to have implanted software designed to identify target computers. But it is unknown, and the FBI won't say, whether the government has tried to surreptitiously search the contents of hard drives.

you can't tell me it isn't already happening here...

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