I figured "No Big Deal", and continued with the disassembly. But when I got the metal panels off, I saw a small white heatshrink-wrapped package. Being ever curious, I sliced the heatshrink package open. I found a little circuit board inside.

On one side of the board, one Atmel AT45D041A four megabit Flash memory chip.

On the other side, one Microchip Technology PIC16F876 Programmable Interrupt Controller, along with a little Fairchild Semiconductor CD4066BCM quad bilateral switch.

Looking further, I saw that the other end of the cable was connected to the integrated ethernet board.

What could this mean? I called the manufacturer's tech support about it. They said, and I quote, "The intregrated service tag identifier is there for assisting customers in the event of lost or misplaced personal information." He then hung up.

A little more research, and I found that that board spliced in between the keyboard and the ethernet chip is little more than a Keyghost hardware keylogger.

The reasons why a computer manufacturer would put this into their laptops can only be left up to your imagination. It would be very impractical to hand-analyze the logs and very CPU-intensive to do so on a computer for every person that purchased a laptop. Why are the keyloggers there? I recently almost found out.

I called the police, as having a keylogger unknown to me in my laptop is a serious offense. They told me to call the Department of Homeland Security. At this point, I am in disbelief. Why would the DHS have a keylogger in my laptop? It was surreal.

So I called them. They told me to submit a "Freedom of Information Act" request.

Under the Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA), the only items exempt from public disclosure are "items relating to *law enforcement tools* and techniques" and "items relating to national security."

The real life implications of this are plain: computer manufacturers appear to be cooperating with the Department of Homeland Security to make every person who buys a new laptop computer subject to immediate, unrestricted government recording of everything they do on those computers. EVERYTHING.