Like tiny fish through a net, key taps dropped from memory

The reason the SMS contents and key taps are monitored at all is so they can be used to invoke Carrier IQ programming interfaces, he continued. Messages or key sequences that contain proprietary tags can be used to manually upload diagnostic information. Those that contain the special formatting dissolve into the ether as soon as they come in. “The content of the SMS is never stored and never transmitted,” Coward said. His version of the software has been confirmed by Dan Rosenberg, an Android security researcher who has reverse engineered Carrier IQ UGG Classic Short Boots and examined the underlying machine language. He said he took the undertaking after viewing a video demonstration posted on Monday that showed the software echoing the precise key taps developer Trevor Eckhart typed into his HTC EVO handset. “What the video is depicting is the application printing out what are known as bugging logs,” he said. “It's a way that applications keep a temporary record of the things they were doing so if anything were to break, a developer could go and read that record and figure out what went wrong. That's very different from the application actually recording that information and sending it off to the carrier.”