“These commercial surveillance packages, such as Spector from SpectorSoft, are turning up in domestic violence cases,” says Cindy Southworth, director of technology at the Washington, D.C.-based organization National Network to End Domestic Violence (NNEDV). The group gets many calls from women who say their abusers “know too much. We advise women, if you’re researching an escape plan or trying to find a new job, don’t do it on your home PC.”

Increasing use of stealthy surveillance software for computers and phones is raising legal concerns and alarm among those who help victims of domestic violence.

“These commercial surveillance packages, such as Spector from SpectorSoft, are turning up in domestic violence cases,” says Cindy Southworth, director of technology at the Washington, D.C.-based organization National Network to End Domestic Violence (NNEDV). The group gets many calls from women who say their abusers “know too much. We advise women, if you’re researching an escape plan or trying to find a new job, don’t do it on your home PC.”

Southworth advises those contacting NNEDV not to delete the surveillance software. Some antivirus packages, such as those from McAfee, F-Secure and Trend Micro, scan to detect stealth-surveillance programs and ask the user if they want to eradicate them.

“If the victim wants to get police involved, you don’t want the spyware eliminated,” says Southworth. In addition, the spyware can report every few minutes to the individual who installed and controls it, and the act of deleting or attempting to delete it has been known to trigger violence against the one being spied on.

One of the first criminal cases linking spyware and domestic abuse occurred six years ago and involved an estranged husband and wife in Belleview, Mich. The husband had secretly installed surveillance software from SpectorSoft to monitor her computer use. After the wife became suspicious she complained to local law enforcement.

The Michigan Attorney General’s high-tech unit came in to investigate, and after getting a search warrant for the husband’s computer they discovered reports of his wife’s computer activities stored there and identified SpectorSoft’s eBlaster as the spyware. SpectorSoft cooperated with Michigan law-enforcement in confirming the husband as the registered software purchaser.