FC: Toothless Carnivore? from Brock Meeks

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

**********

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.




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