On March 23, 2004, an employee at an Anaheim, Calif.-based insurance company was indicted on federal wiretapping charges for allegedly installing an electronic device onto a company computer to record every keystroke made on one keyboard. According to the indictment and a criminal complaint filed earlier in the case, the accused installed a device called a "key katcher" on a computer connected to the Internet that was used by a secretary to the vice president of the insurance company.

This is believed to be the first case in the nation in which a defendant was charged with illegally using keystroke-logger hardware. Such a device is attached to a computer keyboard cable to record every key pressed on the keyboard. Parents use these to monitor the computers accessed by their children, but in this groundbreaking case, the device was used to record keystrokes pressed by company employees.

By Douglas Schweitzer at Computerworld.

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