You have an terminal open and try to SSH to some other machine. So you're asked for your passphrase, you type it in and suddenly some window pops up for some reason (may it update-manager, nautilus, gedit or whatever) and there you have get your passphrase shown in clear text. Everybody near you has the chance to see it and you have -- once again -- to change your passphrases on every single account where you used this one.
And -CMIIW- the same thing may not only when using the terminal with an ssh/scp/etc. session, but with other (X-) windows too.
I wonder, how often this happened already to me:
You have an terminal open and try to SSH to some other machine. So you're asked for your passphrase, you type it in and suddenly some window pops up for some reason (may it update-manager, nautilus, gedit or whatever) and there you have get your passphrase shown in clear text. Everybody near you has the chance to see it and you have -- once again -- to change your passphrases on every single account where you used this one.
And -CMIIW- the same thing may not only when using the terminal with an ssh/scp/etc. session, but with other (X-) windows too.