🚀 go-pugleaf

    Date: Thu, 23 Feb 89 10:41:46 PST
    From: Peter Scott <PJS@naif.JPL.NASA.GOV>
    Subject: Reach Out and Spy on Someone
    To: RISKS-LIST@KL.SRI.COM

    An article in _Digital Review_, February 20, under the title "Reach Out And
    Help Someone" reviews a package for VAX/VMS called Video, from Performance
    Software.  The subtitle says, "...system managers and training coordinators can
    keep an eye on user activity".  Among other things, this package allows anyone
    with appropriate privileges to see what anyone else is typing and receiving on
    their terminal (passwords excepted, I suspect), or to "take over" another
    terminal and broadcast their own commands to it.  You can also record terminal
    sessions and play them back at leisure.

    "With the Video Seer utility, system managers can monitor terminal sessions to
    detect system abuse or simply to identify performance drains on their systems."

    Oh joy.

The ITS operating system (created about 15 years ago on PDP-10s, still
in use today) allows users to spy on each others screens anonymously,
and also to type on each others consoles.  I believe that some other
old systems (such as PLATO) may have had similar capabilities.  
On ITS, I found these features invaluable for assisting users who were
having trouble, for observing students, and also for monitoring system
intruders.  ITS did not implement any system security, and anyone
could Spy, read anyone's files, etc.

Spying is similar to the capability on most systems of some privileged
user(s) being able to access anyone's files and mailboxes without
their knowledge.  The information privacy issues and potential abuses
are probably exactly the same.  If access to someone's files is like
access to their desk drawers or their locker, spying on them is like
looking over their shoulder.  There are clearly legitimate ways in
which these capabilities can be used, notably in educational settings;
it's all a matter of the involved parties understanding and agreeing
to the situation.

As a security tool, spying is only useful for monitoring the session
of an intruder in action; having a security officer to sit around
spying on users at random would be ridiculously ineffiecient, and
would violate security principles.

Monitoring the sessions of users on a keystroke basis is fairly
obviously a pretty stupid way to conduct either a machine performance
or operator productivity analysis.  There may be some legislation
somewhere about using these sorts of capabilities, and I imagine that
the unions have an opnion on the matter.