Seems there has been a bit of a storm in Germany about a suggestion that the government should be entitled to put spyware on the machines of terrorists suspects to monitor what they are doing. Call me a cynic, but I'd have guessed that the UK government already is doing it.

The issues, I suppose, are similar to those surrounding phone tapping, but there is legislation governing when that can be used. If there is no similar legislation covering spyware (and I have never heard of any) then the government would be unlikely to tie its hands voluntarily unless pressure groups created a fuss.

The fuss began last year when a German politician called for compulsory access to Internet-based storage. He has a point when you imagine how much dodgy material is held anonymously on remote servers. Then the Swiss government was reported to be conducting "malware experiments". In November Germany's Federal Court of Justice ruled that what it called "electronic searching of premises" was illegal. Yet in January the German government admitted plans to employ two coders for the purpose at a cost of 300,000 euros, and a police chief later said it was essential to be able a access computers.

The saga was rehearsed at the Kaspersky press conference at Cebit today, where virus analyst Magnus Kalkuhl said he could not guarantee his product could detect such an intrusion. "We have often been asked if the government has asked us to igore a particular attack. The answer is that we have not been asked, and if we were we would say no."

He also revealed a potential security risk in the use of fdlash memory .rather than a hard disk. "When you overwrite data on a magnetic disk, it is actually overwritten and cannot be recovered. But on flash you may not actually overwrite the data. It could be written in another part of the memory. This is transparent to the operating system because the memory's internal logic takes care of it. But if you know what you are doing you can recover the data."

This is unlikley to become an issue for most users, he said. "But it could be important for military systems.@