FC: Toothless Carnivore? from Brock Meeks (fwd)

[William Knowles <wk () C4I ORG>]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 14 Sep 2000 15:09:37 -0400
From: Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>
To: politech () politechbot com
Cc: brock.meeks () msnbc com
Subject: FC: Toothless Carnivore? from Brock Meeks


**********

From: "Meeks, Brock" <Brock.Meeks () MSNBC COM>
To: "'declan () well com'" <declan () well com>
Subject: Toothless Carnivore
Date: Thu, 14 Sep 2000 12:02:21 -0700

Yesterday, during a House hearing on Mob involvement on Wall St.,
Thomas Fuentes, chief of the FBI's Organized Crime Division, coughed
up the following hairball (which I reported yesterday) when asked if
e-mail interception was helpful during FBI investigations.  Fuentes
had earlier groused about how technology and the Internet were making
his job harder.

As a bonus tidbit, Fuentes admitted that the cyrpto genie was out of
the bottle.

The following is transcribed verbatim from yesterday's hearing:

Fuentes:  The difficulty with e-mail is that you really don't hear the
tone of voice.  You can't tell if the person is screaming, it helps to
hear the tone of the voice in trying to determine are they are saying
this tongue-in-cheek or do they really mean it, are they really going
to fly to Arizona and kill somebody and kill his wife and hold him
hostage, is he kidding.

Does the person at the other end show fear in that conversation so
that we could say, they are using intimidation and threats of violence
and they're serious.  Because you can hear these kinds of
conversations in the locker room at your health club and the people
don't really mean it, they're getting ready for a tennis game or
something.

But in our case they mean it, more often than not, and that's the part
that is conveyed through the telephone or through microphone
interception that e-mail interception will never substitute for.

Q: Do you accept the premise that encryption technology is readily
   available to be downloaded even overseas and to be used?

Fuentes:  [pause] Yes.




-------------------------------------------------------------------------
POLITECH -- the moderated mailing list of politics and technology
You may redistribute this message freely if it remains intact.
To subscribe, visit http://www.politechbot.com/info/subscribe.html
This message is archived at http://www.politechbot.com/
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

ISN is hosted by SecurityFocus.com
---
To unsubscribe email LISTSERV () SecurityFocus com with a message body of
"SIGNOFF ISN".