Slashdot Mirror
Earthlink Refuses To Install Carnivore
A reader wrote in with story on C|Net that Earthlink has said that it will *not* install Carnivore, the FBI mail snoop program. Earthlink has said that it will cause disruptions to their customers, and thus refuses to install it. I'd say that's valid. Cringley has a story where he suggests that Carnivore is really about giving the government the power to shut down the Internet.
U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno said she will review the FBI's Carnivore system for intercepting email from criminal suspects to address privacy concerns.
Boy! I hope she gets Al Gore to help her out... She'll probably need it and since he invented the internet, I'm sure he can help her understand how it works.
---
I believe the article says that they did install it but due to incompatibility issues with the operating system it was removed. Since it basically broke their service it was removed. They didn't say that they wouldn't install one. Although I could be wrong. Been there before.
The article says they are not putting it on because it is incompatible with there system, would cause disruptions, and needs some technological modifications. They are CONCERNED about privacy issues, but didn't say no based on that. Unless this is just a delay tactic to try to build a case against Carnivore, it'll probably just go away once the FBI patches the system
Remember, the RIAA and MPAA are both carrying out their little crusades in the name of 'business' reasons.
"See, we plan ahead! That way, we never have to do anything now."
I think it's great that the FBI is using Carnivore, though. I mean, what better way to promote the usage of newer, secure protocols such as IPsec, Secure Shell, SCP, and privacy suites such as Pretty Good Privacy? And what better way, I ask you, to promote the retirement of older, flaky, insecure protocols like telnet and FTP?
Well, something will eventually make people switch. Might as well be the Feds.
Still, I think Earthlink is justified in denying the FBI the ability to shut off their service at random. That's just too much power, plain and simple. I hope they take this to court and win.
Free music from Jack Merlot.
Wow.
I must say, I'm impressed.
Most corporations don't often show much in the way of morality or ethics, and you can't really expect them too. Any publicly held company has to report to their shareholders, and if they start taking moral stands at the risk of stock value, they can get hit with due dilligence lawsuits from their shareholders. Most companies that espouse morals and principles do it as part of a corporate image, which in turn drives profits. (i.e. Microsoft exists to innovate and make computers better, Apple is brought to you by Einstein, because they think different)
So it's very rare the companies have the metaphorical balls to do shit like this. I don't know much about Earthlink, but they have my respect now.
I hope they don't get raped by the gov for this.
Why would they want to do that? There's no real reason that I can think of, unless they want to destroy the U.S. economy in one fell stroke.
Instead, I suggest that they're using Carnivore as the thin edge of a very big wedge. Sure, they could sniff email traffic without a big black box. But by using a box, they get access to ISP premises every time they get a wiretap order.
With big ISPs, they'll probably be installing those things several times a year. Eventually they'll be able to say "hey, why don't you just let us leave this thing plugged in?".
Then, rather than having to go and plug in their big black box every time they get a wiretap order, they'll have the boxes all plugged in all the time.
And that's when we'll find out that those boxes can do stateful packet inspection if asked. Next thing you know, they'll be able to physically prevent you from seeing "unauthorized" data on offshore servers. Kiss that data-haven goodbye.
. . . but then again, I'm feeling paranoid today.
I have no
I do love how we all feel that the Internet is a god-given right.
On a day to day basis, I think most of us forget that the internet evolved out of a government program and not through open-source advocacy.
And yes, the FBI also has the right to be able to intercept both your phone calls and your emails if you are under suspicion. No, they can not block you from sending or receiving, but they can look if they have substantial evidence. And yes, there are laws to make sure that they aren't looking unless they have substantial reason to be looking.
and while they have the right to look, users also have the right to encrypt their email to prevent this.
so instead of whining about your god given right to snoop-free internet access, actively protect yourself by encrypting your emails if your privacy is so important to you.
Cringeley is right to be concerned about the CPOF implications of having FBI-controlled boxen sitting at the edges of American ISPs, though. Think about this in the context of the Internet Gambling Ban headed down the pike. Or the Drug information censorship act (aka, "Methamphetamine Anti-Proliferation Act", now buried in a bankruptcy-reform bill in conference). Sure the courts will probably strike down the prior-restraint provisions of the latter, but imagine a bill that doesn't address the publishing, but merely gives the FBI authority to "kill-file" a certain class of sites at the ISP level, without actually restricting the right to publish per se.
Having consulted on a computer crime case for the FDLE, I've seen the "us-against-them" mentality inside the investigative law enforcement community first hand. "Them" doesn't mean just "criminals" either - from the LE perspective, there are only 3 types of people in the world: cops, convicts, and suspects. That the FBI (with their sterling history since the days of J. Edgar) would be on the leading-edge of such surveillance/enforcement techniques is wholly unsurprising to me.
-Isaac
I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. For Entertainment Purposes Only.
-- http://thegirlorthecar.com funny dating game for guys
And yes, the FBI also has the right to be able to intercept both your phone calls and your emails if you are under suspicion.
I get so tired of people using the word "right" when they mean privelege.
The FBI doesn't have any "rights" whatsoever, constitutional or otherwise. They have priveleges, vast priveleges extended to them by congress and upheld by courts who are more concerned with expediency than they are the constitution, much less individual civil liberties.
These priveleges include wiretapping. However, if the various government agencies continue to abuse these priveleges, congress or the courts could pass a law, or make a ruling, to place additional limits on that privelege, or revoke it entirely.
Not that either institution is likely to display such courage, but they could if they so chose.
and while they have the right to look, users also have the right to encrypt their email to prevent this.
Again, we have the privelege of being able to use encryption to prevent snooping.
We desperately need a constitutional amendment guaranteeing us a right to privacy, including encryption and control of our data.
Our forfathers took the right to privacy to be a given, and only really anticipated one possible abuse of it, which they explicitly disallowed in the constitution. Had they taken the subject up more generally this wouldn't be a problem, but alas, they considered privacy in large part to be a given and didn't explicitly write it into the constitution as a right. While they could extrapolate many threats to our democracy, they never dreamed of the kinds of intrusions into our private lives we now take for granted, and are no doubt spinning in their graves as I type this. As a result, a right we all perceive ourselves is woefully missing from our most fundamental law, with the kind of auful results we read about here on slashdot nearly every week.
Alas, I am about as optomistic about congress and the states enacting a constitutional amendment to protect our privacy as I am about NASA getting a reasonable level of funding. The chances in both cases are unfortunately nil.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Taking a stand with the FBI is a risky position if you are a smaller ( 20,000 users) ISP. Earthlink has the legal and financal means to defend actions it believes are wrong.
A head systems admin at a major University once warned me about crossing the FBI. It's a very quick way of going out of business. He made it very clear that the FBI is aware of the economics of ISP's. If you're down for more then a few minutes you'll start to lose customers. ISPs that go against the feds find out pretty quickly that all they have to do is confiscate all your equiptment as evidence. Maybe after a year or so you'll get your stuff back.
I can picture the feds in front of the judge now: "Well your honor, we wanted to place a monitor on the network but they would not allow us to. The only recourse we have is to take the computers and examine the hard drives."
Bam, Feds come knocking on your door, they leave with a bunch of computers, next week all your customers are gone and you've got bills to pay.
Filtering E-mail requires access to the application layer...
Bzzzzt. Incorrect. Thanks for playing.
All email is transmitted from place to place using the well-known SMTP port (port 25). All a router has to do is forward any packets with that destination port (incoming OR outgoing) in their header to the original destination and the FBI's destination, where the individual packets can be put back together into the complete email using all the other fun stuff in the various packet headers. It's like making a copy of every email that gets sent to or from that network. Of course, there really wouldn't be any way for a simple router to know WHO those emails are for; they're not capable of, say, doing a "grep" operation on the actual contents of the data of the packets to find the "To: " field of the email. This of course would mean that every email that goes through that network would end up in the FBI's evil little hands. EVERY EMAIL. Similarly, if they were to forward ports 20 and 21, every FTP packet could be forwarded to the FBI as well as its actual destination. For port 23, every byte of every telnet session. For port 80, every bit of a webpage. You get the idea. And what else is in every TCP/IP packet? Yep; the destination IP address. So the FBI could also know precisely what machine was on the receiving end of every packet, too... isn't that great?
Now, there's no guarantee that these Carnivore boxes wouldn't do the same thing, of course, but if they only forward emails from/to a particular address (because they DO have access to the Application layer), that would be much better than having to set a router to forward ALL emails to the FBI's minions. Not that I'm saying Carnivore isn't evil... it quite clearly is. "I'm from the government; I'm here to help" isn't one of the All-Time Greatest Lies for nothing, you know.
Unfortunately, I suppose there are people in this world that are ignorant enough to write stuff like that, let alone buy it.
...and other people who, having only part of the knowledge required to accurately pass judgement on someone, are ignorant enough to dispute it. Know your facts before speaking...
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
In a shock development, noted Karma whore Signal "Siggy" 11 has become a troll! Perhaps demoralised by the constant pressure of the fatwa or "trollslap" launched by his enemies, he released a post full of trollworthy statements. In one post, he combined:
- The incorrect technical statement: Witness the "NSA key" in Windows 95/98/NT/W2K
- The moronic political view: Someday, someone is going to need to devise a technical solution to these political problems
- The ludicrous hyperbole: This is why they are so afraid of geeks - they know we have it within our power to end this form of tyranny for good. We are in control of the ultimate modern day press.
- Another maddeningly silly technical statement: until we rearchitecture the network to utterly defeat measures like this (transparent crypto?)
Clearly, Siggy's move into trolling will put pressure on the established slashdot trolls to compete. In a CNN inteview, streetlawyer, speaking for the notorious inchfan troll collective said Rob Malda was unavailable for comment.-- the most controversial site on the Web
And I won't even touch how completely ridiculous the idea is in the first place ... well okay I will. Why in the WORLD would the FBI try to shut down internet connectivity for the US? And why would they need these boxes to do it? If they don't have the legal right to do so, ISPs and their well-payed laywers wouldn't let it happen (guess what, ISP technicians can unhook the Carnivore box and go about their business). If somehow the FBI did initiate some digital martial law where they had the right to do this, why would they need the boxes? They could just walk into the ISP with their nice shiny guns and start unplugging ATM cables.
These Weekly World News /. news bits are great fun, but please don't take them seriously.
You know what to do with the HELLO.
You know what to do with the HELLO. ...
Help create an open-source world