'Carnivore' Eats Your Privacy

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http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,37503,00.html

10:05 a.m. Jul. 11, 2000 PDT

WASHINGTON -- An FBI surveillance system called Carnivore is alarming
privacy advocates and some members of Congress.

Agents typically install the specialized computer on the networks of
Internet providers, where it intercepts all communications and records sent
to or from the target of an investigation, the Wall Street Journal reported
on Tuesday.

An FBI spokesman told the paper that the agency typically has about 20
Carnivore computers on hand to use when conducting Internet monitoring in
compliance with court orders.

But some critics say the practice of intercepting the network traffic of
all users, even for a brief period of time, could run afoul of federal
privacy laws and even the U.S. Constitution's prohibition on unreasonable
searches and seizure.

"It's the electronic equivalent of listening to everybody's phone calls to
see if it's the phone call you should be monitoring. You develop a
tremendous amount of information," Mark Rasch, a former federal prosecutor,
told the Journal.

Representative Bob Barr (R-Ga.), a conservative privacy advocate, said, "If
there's one word I would use to describe this, it would be 'frightening.'"

Not all Internet service providers seem to like the idea of a government
computer silently recording their network traffic, especially since
Carnivore systems are typically kept in locked boxes, and at least one
company is challenging the practice in court.

The FBI reportedly dubbed the system "Carnivore" because it has the ability
to get at the "meat" of interesting or suspicious communications.

The FBI says such automated monitoring is necessary to perform surveillance
on packet-switched networks, and successfully persuaded Congress in 1994 to
require telephone companies to make their digital networks readily
snoopable. The bulk of legal wiretaps are used to investigate drug-related
crimes, according to annual statistics published by the U.S. federal court
system.

FBI Director Louis Freeh has in the past pressed for limits on what
encryption technology Americans may use, and the FBI last year
unsuccessfully asked the Internet Engineering Task Force to build support
for wiretaps into network protocols.

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