It's called "Magic Lantern". It is a government-created spy virus that automatically captures keystrokes from as many computers as they wish, and secretly sends them to a database. It is authorized by a rubber-stamp from a judge based on hearsay evidence from a single government requestor.
An automated version can scan thousands, and its easy to consider scaling to arbitrary size, based on bandwidth limitations.
Detecting it can be done on a hit-and-miss basis by non-American anti-virus software scanning for the software signature, and by scanning for unusual packet traffic in and out.
You can try to avoid it by using a separate PC for secure communications (or public library, like the terrorists do) using an unusual operating system other than Windows or Linux/Unix, and by encryption of emails. But that doesn't do much considering a large enough voume of captured traffic will turn up your name, emailed plaintext fragments and other identifiers, that, if needed, can be correlated and tracked back.
This correlation is the biggest challenge facing NSA due to the billions of messages per hour. They got the heavy iron to do it, tho', according to [redacted] and [redacted]. |
