COFEE -- Remember Carnivore?

Microsoft has announced a new tool that lets law enforcement agencies examine the content of your computer in an automated fashion. Called “COFEE” (for “Computer Online Forensic Evidence Extractor”), it comes on a USB stick. You plug it into a PC, it runs its programs, and bingo, you’ve stolen data about the PC.

Exactly WHAT data is unclear, as is the question of what it does with encrypted or passworded files.  Microsoft says it is meant for use “by law enforcement only with proper legal authority,” but in Bush’s America where there is virtually no such thing as illegal wiretaps and eavesdropping, that’s a pretty meaningless statement.

So with this tool, the police can presumably peek into any passworded Microsoft Office files (although whether it can access PGP or other more secure formats is unclear) and see what you’ve been up to.

This is reminiscent of the ill-fated “Carnivore” program launched in 2000 by Clinton’s FBI which was designed to secretly scan millions of emails.  After a huge uproar, the program was dropped.

A psychiatrist friend of mine used to say that his favorite patients were the paranoids because “they have a good grasp of reality – they think the government is out to get them.”