A closely-held software package designed to allow law enforcement agencies to secretly monitor a suspect's computer turned up on an anonymous Web site in the Netherlands Wednesday, along with user manuals, financial information, contracts and invoices apparently stolen from the company . . .
A closely-held software package designed to allow law enforcement agencies to secretly monitor a suspect's computer turned up on an anonymous Web site in the Netherlands Wednesday, along with user manuals, financial information, contracts and invoices apparently stolen from the company that makes the surveillance tool.

Frank Jones, founder of New York-based Codex Data Systems, blamed unnamed critics in the security and hacking community for the exposure of his company's spyware product, called D.I.R.T. (Data Interception by Remote Transmission). But Jones downplayed the significance of the leak, dismissing the documents as outdated and obsolete, and emphasizing that the program won't run properly without a software key -- which is not including in the trove of purloined files.

Jones has been marketing D.I.R.T. to the law enforcement community since the late 1990's. It's not known if he's had any takers -- the FBI has it's own, similar tool under development -- but files included in the Netherlands stash appear to identify several organizations that received price quotes from Codex, including the Egyptian and Ukranian governments, and the U.S. District Court of New Jersey's Pretrial Services Division, responsible for supervising criminal defendants as they await trial. Jones would neither confirm nor deny the authenticity of the price quote files.

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