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Emergency Hearing About Carnivore - Updated
Joe Moloughney was the first of several folks to point out that an emergency hearing is scheduled for 19:30GMT (3:30 Washington time) regarding disclosure of information about the FBI's Carnivore data surveillance system. The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) filed suit (pdf) and were granted the hearing because their request for details on how Carnivore works (under the Freedom of Information Act) have not yet been acted upon. [Updated 11:45GMT by t] voodoogumbo writes with an updated from Fox News that "[t]he courts declined to unwrap Carnivore."
I glad you laught as much as I did "bouncer guy" !!
wiZd0m
I beleive you may be misinterprating the request. The request for all records on Carnivore likely refers to asking for the technical details of how the system works and does what it is made to do, not the records stored in the Carnivore system itself.
-={(Astynax)}=-
-={(Astynax)}=-
"Darkness beyond Twilight"
What impressed me was that what mindspring did was extremely logical.
They simply said 'Look, if a court orders (or a judge issues a warrant, etc) data to be obtained from our systems, then we will comply and help do this. If a court orders that Mr. Smiths email be sniffed, we will assist in doing this. '
They simply refused to allow a box to be added to their network to allow the FBI to sniff whenever they wanted. And I wouldn't either... it's my network.. what reason do they have to dictate how I will build my network?
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
If you notice, the "Bill of Rights" message was moderated to 0. Probably exactly where it should be; of extremely marginal interest, but not a true -1 worthy troll.
Moderators in aggragate are a lot smarter than you think.
Carnivore is a crackers dream come true. Imagine a remotely accessible box designed specifically for sniffing and that is required by law.
It's obvious that these boxes will be cracked one day, it's just a mater of time. Carnivore is still just a computer with software written by humans.
Any ISP would be right to refuse a black box on their network. They even might be able to argue that it can unreasonably impact the safety of their business.
THe FBI's been known to put the law aside when it comes to catching criminals. The big problem is that the law is the only protection for the innocent bunch.
By strong opinion is that they should stay out of it, and do their thing through different means. Everybody knows that they bug houses, scan phone conversations and sniff networks as it is. People kind of know that, but they assume that "it's never them," and that sort of thing doesn't happen where they live...
Well, guess what, it does.
What boggles my mind is that with Carnivore, they're bringing all their chicaneries upfront for everybody to see, hoping that they cann enstill a sense of trust by being 'honest.' I'm curious to see how this thing works, and I wonder who the "group of experts" that will examine the software are.
Be cautious! This could be the beginning of a privacy-free era. With more an more people moving to computers and the Internet, the Carnivore and its followers will provide an unbeatable communism-inspired way to control the crowds into a system that which will be the handiest tool to turn the country communist.
The carnivore must be filed away and forgotten about!
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$_='hfflbwfsbhfzp vs';s/(^.{4})(.{7 })(.+$)/$3 $2 $1/
"Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed"
-Thomas Jefferson, Declaration of Independence
I believe that this second quote can be attributed to Thomas Jefferson as well - "Those who would trade liberty for security shall have and deserve neither."
You'd think that if they passed a law requiring background checks on people who wanted to buy a gun, keeping criminals from buying said firearms, you'd be able to keep guns out of the hands of people who really shouldn't have them, and gun fatalities would go down. But according to this abcnews article (which has strangely disappeared since I read it last night) about a study of states that had to change their gun laws to comply with the Brady Bill, that hasn't been the case. When someone says "it's for your own good," I say that I'd rather take my chances.
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
www.teslabox.com
open source is too "open" for a government agency...if they did that anyone could go over the code and find an exploit.....maybe...
But when it comes to matters of the FBI even I, who disagrees with carnivore's existence, think that "maybe" is too much of a risk...If someone figured out an exploit they could possibly hack the file containing the list of whose email is getting filtered, and then notify the person....not a good thing because the FBI is only going to set this system to catch criminals, and I wouldn't want criminals to know they are bieng monitored......would you?
Maybe the snapshot of the source code that deals with the actual methods of filtering could be made public...that way we would have some assurance that they aren't just copying all packets to 2 files, one that contains suspect emails, and one that contains all the rest..... Then what would stop them from posting dummy code??
Nothing wrong with the joke, but it's been floating around the Internet for years, and most of us have already seen it several times. Plus, it has absolutely nothing to do with the discussion about Carnivore and the FOIA. If you had posted it to a discussion to a thread relating to Microsoft, Windows, software licensing, etc. that might have been a little more appropriate. Use a little discression next time.
--
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
"Puh-leeeeeeze. Unless the FBI all of a sudden raises its number of employees by a factor of ten thousand or so, surveillance on every American citizen is not possible."
Sure it is, if you have black boxes attached to all the entry nodes (ie, ISPs) in the country. The vast majority of e-mail messages wouldn't interest the FBI at all. Those that match the keywords (or whatever exact system Carnivore uses) would be stored in a database for later retrieval. That way, when the FBI does want to investigate a particular person, they already have a log of anything he/she sent since the start of the system that might be "interesting."
Just because most of the logged messages are never used again or are never seen by human eyes doesn't meen it isn't snooping on everyone.
--
"Better dead than smeg."
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The real Captain Derivative has a Slashdot ID.
It's the law, you moron. The same reason your wireless phone provider needed to install a system to do this. The FBI was kind enough to provide a system that for you in the event that you haven't one.
Free BeOS, runs from a Linux partition
While the person posting this is probably a troller, the Bill of Rights is at the very core of this issue. Trollers can be on-topic and insightful sometimes -- even if it's an accident.
I'm glad to see the Bill of Rights in this thread. It's very relevant.
-- In the future, everyone will code Perl for 15 minutes. --
> An example is the former East German (DDR) government's Stasi secret police.
See, they should have used Rambus instead of DDR, and they might still be in business.
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
YEAH!! They should have to get a search warrant or something before they can use Carnivore. Oh. Ummm, never mind.
This has been a test. If this had been an actual Sig, you would have been amused.
> Anyway, the FBI was saying that if they opened it up, ppl could learn how to get around it.
Yeah, people will start disguising their mail as dope and getting FedEx to deliver it.
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Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
My statement was intended to serve as the basis for constructive conversation concerning the removal of the current oppressive regime that has been controlling the US. If you don't choose to engage that concept, that does not make my statement 'unconstructive'. It simply means you a) don't believe it, or b) are not interested in pursuing it. Is that too serious for your taste?
I will say that the kind of mutually agreed pretentions you suggest (pretend it didn't happen, pretend the government is 'okay', that we are not living in an illegally empowered police state) is to give ones tacit approval of the corruption that infests the former United States.
Truth should not be so lightly dismissed. That amounts to self-censorship in direct opposition to your own self-interest, probably based on fear. No doubt the fear that others will compliment you on the fit of your tinfoil hat....
Huh. I seem to recall the Colonial Tricorner was widely sneered at, too.
"The Internet is made of cats."
The plausible lie that you are using is that this "will improve everyone's security", but that is unlikely. E-mail tapping wouldn't have stopped the Unibomber, it wouldn't have stopped Tim McVeigh, it wouldn't have stopped the World Trade Center bombing; in fact, it wouldn't have stopped ANY act of terrorism that has occurred in this country.
What you actually want is to silence the views of people like me; that is why you said something about monitoring anyone who complains about monitoring. You pretend to espouse lofty views - but your motivation is as common as dirt.
Evil has hidden agendas like you do, good does not. Evil pretends to do one thing while actually doing something else, good has no need to hide what it is doing. Yes, YOU ARE THE BAD GUY, and you always will be.
By the way, part of the reason I chose the name Veteran is that I am one; no flags burned, but now and then I do enjoy exposing the occasional street fascist for what he is.
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them with signatures...
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-- The Funk, The Whole Funk, And Nothing But The Funk
What's stopping FBI just writing a source code for a simple, bogus search engine and releasing that as Carnivore?
Frankly, I find it hard to believe your sincerity in such sentiments since you posted them as an Anonymous Coward. Are you afraid of something? Perhaps by posting anonymously you're expressing that you probably are doing something, if not illegal or extralegal, at least that would reflect negatively upon you if your identity were known.
The folks expressing concern about Carnivore reading their mail are no more paranoid than you are being by posting anonymously.
-- Alastair
Am I grateful for the work you do? Yes, you do dangerous work. I do understand the limitations of your job, and I don't expect more than you can do.
In the final analysis, protecting myself and my family IS my job. I understand that fact, and I have taken the steps necessary to give me as good a chance of doing that job as I can.
The FBI should have at least released an outline of how the system works. In doing so they would have staved off this lawsuit, or at least the emergency hearing without giving away enough information to compromise their supposed need for secrecy.
Yes, the content of e-mails caught do need to remain secret, and would not have fallen under the Freedom of Information Act.
However, the basics of how the system work did not. The training manuals for stakeouts, search and seizure, arrests, due force, etc have been release under Freedom of Information requests. The outline of how the system worked, should have been. For that matter even releasing the source code should have been possible, but probably too much to ask of the Justice Department.
You are right, the government would have no reason to monitor most of "us". I think I speak rightly when I say that most /. readers are pretty innocent and not a threat. However, this system has no checks and balances. Lets assume for argument sake that you are not a prime suspect for monitoring. You are an average, law abiding guy, who pays his taxes. What if 30 years from now the laws change enough that you are considedred a threat, the government could continue to try to exert more control and then finally be at a point where YOU are out of control. YOU are now a prime suspect for monitoring.
However, that is an admittedly unlikely scenario. But consider this. Lets assume again (for argument sake) that you are Pro-Choice. Now lets assume that the government passes a law that makes abortion illegal (a much more likely scenario). Your daughter is pregnant, and you take her to get an abortion and it is discusses in an e-mail. BAM! Your thrown in jail because you were under monitoring because of your pro-choice tendencies.
Still too unfeasable? Ok. Lets say there is no anti-abortion law. Lets say that the new director of the FBI is a very strong pro-lifer, and he institutes secret policy to have all pro-choice people monitored. You are found talking about pro-choice in an e-mail. (And why wouldn't you talk about it in e-mail. It's legal, and your not the type of person who would be monitored anyway). But when the FBI director finds out, he has your FBI Record fabricated to include other violations such as felonies or murders.
I'm not saying that it is likely that these things will happen, but the existence of an (unchecked and unbalanced) system like Carnivore would allow such things to happen.
I apologize if I offended/confused anyone with the abortion scenario, it was simply the first that came to mind.
Shaun
ICQ:1634382
There was this Timothy McVeigh guy who had some "non-mainstream" political views. Good thing he had his privacy, we wouldn't want the government infringing on that!
Well, maybe you should read up on the
other
Timothy Mc Veigh
and maybe get a clue about what privacy means.
-- The Funk, The Whole Funk, And Nothing But The Funk
Why not just use a service outside of the USA if you plan on doing illegal things via email?
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Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again
First: If you feel strongly about it have the guts to post under your handle not as an Anonymous Coward.
Second (and last): Regarding anti-government statements. Ummmmm, free-speech? 1st Amendment? Where do you think we'd be if people weren't allowed to make anti-government statements? If you answer "Why we'd all be British colonists" then you got it totally right.
The right to disapprove of the government and point out it's flaws is crucial to a free nation. Without that right we might as well live in Russia, okay that's pure rhetoric and I apologize. But seriously we must be able to criticize the government and monitoring of all communications because of such criticism will exert the proverbial "chilling effect" on that criticism. The Supreme Court has already tackled that one.
Absimiliard
Don't you agree that the safest place to be is a 4-wall room with bars so noone can harm you? Government is not here to protect you. The fear that media have impressed upon you is false. The terrorists and child molesters (That you must so fear of to trust the government everyones privacy) affect less than 20 people a year.. of 400 million (Or whatever the population of USA is now?). And do not forget - with all your personal and credit data on internet, most of communications through internet, omniscience almost equals omnipotence. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
I may disagree with your opinion, but I will defend to death your right to speak it.
we're worried that people with mr. mcveigh's morals might get in a position of power and use these tools in ways that would get less press then okc (and other evil acts) because they's get covered up and yet would be much more complete in their destruction.
six million jews were killed back in the late 30's, early 40's in no small part by using a variety of surveillence methods to capture them and by stopping the press from reporting them.
okc was terrible, but that was probably just a slow day in "the final solution." power should always be attached to a leash - a damn short one.
US Citizen living abroad? Register to vote!
Look, while I understand that people don't like the idea of having the government read their e-mail, I think that a lot of people frankly overestimate their importance in the grand scheme of things. There are millions upon millions of people in this country. And yet some little schmoe from Asshole, Indiana thinks that he is so important that the "gummint" has got dozens of agents watching his every move and reading every little piece of mail that he gets.
It's not that at all, you are missing the point. As soon as somebody uses encryption today, they are immediately unusual. The use of encryption alone could provoke further investigation. If everybody (and yes, that includes those guys in Indiana) used encryption, then encryption itself would be more secure. There was a good explanation involving envelopes vs. postcards, but I can't find it now. Anybody got a link?
Basically, the average person does not gain from using encryption routinely. The people who need to use encryption gain from the average people using encryption routinely.
Short version: You can't build on a lot until the existing building has been removed.
Not bad. An excellent beginning. You will be awarded the specially designed copper-mesh beanie (CMB) complete with embedded ethernet port and tcp/ip stack.CMBs are among the most sought-after of the next generation of peripherals for the Truly and Deeply Paranoid.
Among the many forthcoming applications, there is one in particular being developed (using Perl) that should be available soon. It is called Perl of Wisdom(tm). PoW(tm) is one of the new so-called 'preamble enhancement applications'. In additition to the protection afforded your thoughts by the CMD device (shielding your brainewaves from the various thought manipulation and mind reading technologies now in use), PoW(tm) allows you to quickly and easily remove the disinformation structures imposed on your neuronal networks by your exposure to 'spin' -- e.g. the media. This process is fully programmable to allow you to selectively retain whatever mind-control programming you may deem useful in your career or personal life. Note that a slashdot deconstructor module is also being discussed...
Should help lower those stress levels, too.
"The Internet is made of cats."
Yep. The law stipulates a maximum response time, and the article says the FBI's 10 days expired Friday.
They weren't obligated to fully *comply* with the request, but if they weren't going to comply they at least need to respond why as specified by the bill (most probably citing the exemptions intended at protecting law enforcement methods and investigations). Apparently, they haven't done even that.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
My physician has told me to watch my stress level. That is why I try to avoid thinking about the big picture, whenever possible. You have made that impossible for me, so here goes. Bear with me, my line of BS is pretty well developed, even if it is total BS.
The organization of society is necessarily conditioned by the main mode of economic endeavor. During the pre-industrial age, that was agriculture. Consequently, land-based organizations arose to control access to the land. Over the centuries, those organizations took various forms, culminating in the modern nation-state.
At about the same time that the nation-state was coming to maturity, the industrial age was beginning. Because an industrial society relies so heavily on natural resources and therefore the land, the nation-state was already prepared to control industry, and few if any real changes in the structure of society would have been necessary, if things had stopped there.
However, in the past 50 years, the Information Age has turned this whole system on its ear. Information is now the main mode of economic endeavor. Information, as we are now seeing, is exceedingly difficult to control using nation-state-based systems. In fact, the current economy is so different from an agricultural/industrial economy, the very concept of statehood is in the process of becoming irrelevant.
In conclusion, we needn't worry about "the removal of the current oppressive regime"; it will simply wither and die as it becomes less and less relevant, less and less able to cope with the changes the information-based economy wreaks on a daily basis. (I mean, really, software patent? Hello!!??) We should instead turn our attention to developing successor systems and concepts, to ensure that the next phase is an improvement over the current phase.
How's that for constructive? (I might say it was more deconstructive;) Can I wear a gold-toned tinfoil hat now?
"...request for details on how Carnivore works...have not yet been acted upon."
Calvin: *scribbling furiously* Well, uh, Miss Wormwood, see, the food goes in this end with all the teeth and then goes into this part (psst, Susie, what's the scientific name for "guts"?) the, uh, intensifications right.
--
Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
Agreed. To take this a step further, what makes email any different than verbal communication? Merely the fact that it can be stored, retrieved, searched, etc.
So for those that say Carnivore is generally OK, then how about we allow the FBI to dangle a microphone in everyone's living room? Don't worry, they'll only listen in if they have a court order to do so. They won't search the recordings looking for words and phrases that might indicate that you're doing something wrong. They're really on the up and up and only doing this to catch criminals, so you have nothing to worry about.
This Doctor Fun cartoon says it all...
http://metalab.unc.edu/Dave/Dr-Fun/df200007/df2000 0712.jpg
--- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
I hereby invoke Godwin's Avenger on all of you for bringing up Nazis.
Now go away, if you allow this discussion to devolve into this sort of rhetoric neither you nor your opponent have any business continuing.
Neither of you are discussing, you are both merely expounding.
Absimiliard
I'd say that posting the entire bill of rights to a story that relates to only specific parts of it, is troll. I have absolutely nothing against the BoR, or the rights that are delineated therein. But posting the entire thing to a discussion like this is a cheesy knee-jerk reaction that does nothing to move the dialogue at all.
"Politicians are interested in people. Not that this is always a virtue. Fleas are interested in dogs." P.J. O'Rourke
-- Dave
This post expresses my opinion, not that of my employer. And yes, IAAL.
IT IS THE DUTY OF THE GOVERNMENT TO PROTECT ME AND MY FAMILY.
Where did you ever get that lunatic idea?
Sure, it is one of the (few legitimate) duties of government to provide for the common defense, but that means protection of the governed as a whole, not the individual or family. (Not that they're necessarily doing a wonderful job of the former, either.) The only person or entity whose duty it is to protect you and your family is YOU.
See Ruby Ridge as an example of how well the government protected Randy Weaver (who was doing nothing illegal) and his family.
Or for that matter, any number of crime victims who suffered while waiting for the cops to show up and "protect" them rather than taking responsiblity for their own protection.
-- Alastair
No, my brother forgot to pay his ISP bill, so his account has been deactivated. Feel free to talk about him.
Absolutely. :))
The role of the federal government as was set up in the original constitution was to provide for the common good. Common in this case refers very specifically to the states.
The states were the authority for most of the populations regular activities. The only time when the federal government got involved was when something involved more than one state as in disputes, it was a matter of foreign policy, or it was a matter of absolute security.
In April 1865 when Lee surrendered at Appomatix, this whole issue of states rights went down the tubes. Since that time the federal government has been on a grwoth spurt finally culminating with the Clinton administration. In the past ten years, there have been exponentially more crimes incorporated into "federal Jurisdiction" than in the past. Point in case, Hate Crimes Legislation.
(how come whenever I start to rant like this I feel like I should be on a ranch somewhere in Montana?
"Draw them in with the prospect of gain, take them by confusion." Sun Tzu
The American Government's primary function is to preserve the inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. You seem to have forgotten, but liberty is one of those rights. We fought a war over two hundred years ago so that we could live in a free society. The state of New Hampshire's motto, "Live free or die" comes to mind. Why don't you and your beloved family move to some third world police state, where you will be safe from the chaos that necessarily accompanies freedom?
The number of people murdered by out-of-control governments this century is in eight digits. The number of people murdered by terrorists this century is miniscule by comparison. The former is the greater threat. End of argument.
Too often people assume the government is trying to hide something, when in fact, a FOIA reqest is just sitting on somebody's desk who's been on vacation for two weeks.
(OT) Does anyone else out there find it funny this was modded informative instead of insightful? Are there really people out there going, "hmm, Amendments to the Constitution, how interesting, strange that I've never heard of them before." I would wager that those people are instead saying to themselves "how insightful of this individual to remind us of the fundimental concepts on which our nation was based." But who knows, I suppose if you're the type to moderate karmabait up...
Well, that isn't' quite true. For one thing, someone would have to realize that the evidence was obtained as a result of an illegal search. Usually there is closer relationship temporally between the illegal search and evidence that later results from that search, e.g., an officer makes an illegal search of a trunk and finds evidence, such as drugs, that give rise to probable cause to search the guys house and then find a drug lab in the basement. Here, the illegal search may be a long ways from the next event, and no one realize that the reason the FBI were interested in someone was an email six months ago. The government can also argue some of the exceptions to the "fruit of the poisoned tree" doctrine, such as inevitability, i.e., we would have found the evidence even without the tainted search.
Unless the FBI all of a sudden raises its number of employees... surveillance on every American citizen is not possible
Excuse me? Just because they don't have the capability to spy on everyone doesn't mean there is nothing to be paranoid over! Doing it once is just as wrong as 240 million times..
they are probably doing something illegal or extralegal
Would you like it if the FBI decided to do warrantless door to door searches of your neighborhood?? I'm sure the thought of the FBI opening all your mail before you get it leaves you with the fucking warm fuzzies, right?
Um, uh.. Damn, I'll think of something after the hangover.
Thank you for clarifying that, now I suppose I'm free to step outside and brutally slaughter millions of people, loot and damage stores worldwide because of my religious beliefs (or lack thereof).
Frankly sir, that is a bunch of bullshit. I believe in being a nice person for its own sake, not out of fear of eternal punishment. That's what churches, synagogues, mosques, temples, etc. should be teaching. Not that you will perish eternally for some minute sin but that being kind and good IS THE REWARD in itself. It's really sad to read this kind of drivel here, it really makes me sad for the human race, we have so far to go I wonder if we'll ever make it...
Ashley Clark
Ahem... NO. I can give you a damned good counter to the "only criminals have something to hide" schtick right now. I'm a professed pervert - specifically, I'm into BDSM (bondage, sadomasochism, that sort of fun 'kinky stuff'). Now, while I personally am perfectly fine with broadcasting this to the world, and choose to accept any difficulty this causes me, there are some people who choose not to, and I respect that - there's a LOT of people who don't understand that consentual power play does not equal rape, much like there are a lot of people who don't understand that being a homosexual does not mean that you're a pedophile. I have personally been implicated in more than one sexual assault case for no other reason than because it was common knowledge that I was into 'kinky sex', and the local authorities associated this with being a rapist. My civil liberties were violated because of totally legal and irrelevant practices that some people prejudicially decided made me a 'bad person'. And while I have no problem with PEOPLE knowing everything about me, I would prefer that AGENCIES have as difficult a time as possible clicking a few boxes on a form and saying "round up everyone who eats oatmeal and drives more than 30 miles a day to work in for questioning; our recent psych profile says these people are 3x more likely to be rapists." Fuck that.
-Hentai [in vita non pacem est]
You know what to do with the HELLO.
You know what to do with the HELLO. ...
Help create an open-source world
Let's take black helicopters first. Yes, there are photos of these. IIRC, a few years ago, the feds got a bit of a black eye (Black Eye?) when they claimed, "Don't be silly, we don't even have any black helicopters" - and immediately photos of black helicopters with US government markings were produced by civilians. These seem to exist, but their existence doesn't necessarily mean anything sinister.
As for the case of Black Helicopters - it's hard to say. As I mentioned above, there are photos of black helicopters, but you can't tell much about their usage or intent from a photo. How would you be able to tell if a black helicopter is in fact a Black Helicopter, short of a government admission or witnessing its acts yourself? The first one is not going to happen, I think, and you've pretty much dismissed accounts of the second. I'm sure people do work on the [B|b]lack [H|h]elicopters, as you state, but again, working on an engine doesn't tell you what the helicopter is used for.
And let's not forget that people of good will can still have very different interpretations of the same events or make errors. A true story from my recent history: when I lived in Phoenix, Arizona, I had to drive past a National Guard air base on my way to and from work. (It's the one near Camelback, almost in Scottsdale, if I remember my commute correctly.) One morning I saw black helicopters at the base - apparently all-black, unmarked helicopters - and said, "Black Helicopters?! I have to get a photo of these!" So at my next opportunity, I brought my camera, parked near the base, and walked right up to the fence. Only when I got that good a look at them, both of us standing still and separated by maybe 200 feet, did I realize that they weren't actually black, but a very dark flat green with extremely subdued markings. And I'd seen them several times, in daylight, before finally perceiving their true appearance. It was a touch disappointing, but a good object lesson in how hard it is to positively identify something.
I hate to burst your bubble, mate, but it's not "idiots like me" that invented suitcase nuke bombs, biological weapons, and Ryder trucks.
With the exception of the Ryder trucks (why did you bring that up?) they were invented by the government. Not idiots like you. I'll bet you sat at home drinking beer and shadowboxing with your TV, rooting for the cops during the Seattle WTO protests.
-- The Funk, The Whole Funk, And Nothing But The Funk
This could set a very interesting precedent of making government technology public. While I support the idea of accountability and public review of government tools and processes used in intelligence and surveillence, I worry about a potential backlash from this and similar cases.
Basically, from what I can gather, the Carnivore system looks like a glorified packet sniffer. It's not something I'm happy about, but I haven't exactly been losing any sleep over it. However, the response I've already seen, including this suit, make me wonder how hard the government is going to try to keep the rest of its intelligence technologies secret. If the public panics over a sniffer, what would the think of more sophisticated tools used for tracing, wiretapping, en/decryption, etc.?
I know that a lot of the excitement has been generated by sensationalist media hype, (the extrapolation of Carnivore into some sort of global on/off switch for the Internet is solid gold BS, if you ask me) but I really think that choosing our battles might be wise here. We don't want to send the government into a paranoid spin, and make it that much harder to find out what they're up to later on.
Right.. I guess he forgot that Stalin, Mao and
Hitler operated independently of their governments.
What's with people these days?
-- The Funk, The Whole Funk, And Nothing But The Funk
I believe Earthlink was forced to install Carnivore.
Digression continued.. I'm under the opinion that taxes and Law enforcment should be the domain of the states. The federal government should be allowed to beat up the states when they don't give it money or when they break (or fail to enforce) federal laws, but the federal government should not reall have armed people running arround and should not directly collect money from people. It would be a nice expansion of seperation of powers which would be very effective at preventing law enforcment or tax agencies from having too much power. Specifically, congress would not want to give the states more power, so congress would be less likely to pass laws helping law enforcment or tax agencies in unreasonable ways. I know the states are pretty corupt, but vertical speration of powers has a streangth that horizontal lacks.
I think the EU will probable evolve into a good model of a large scale government. There is no way that the Europeans will allow the EU to tax them directly.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
So you're the creep always hiding outside my window, listening to my private conversations. Watch out, Buster, because I've got a potful of boiling oil and catshit waiting for the next time you come by to eavesdrop on me.
How many of us do you really believe were born yesterday?
The FBI has an uninterrupted history of abuse when it comes to civil liberties, beginning with J. Edgar Hoover and continuing to this day.
Illegal taps and surveillance of political figures (including Martin Luthar King, Jr.) and human rights activists, illegal enforcement actions, even framing innocent people for crimes they did not commit.
All of this was possible because the FBI had the tools to be privy to private information they were not constitutionally permitted to have access to.
It is absurd to expect such an organization to behave more responsibly now that they have a tool orders of magnitude more powerful than any they had in the past to violate our privacy.
The only reasonable possibility is that they are deliberately dragging their feet, and the judicial process is an excellent one to give them the requisite kick in the rear and obtain the information the ACLU is entitled to under the Freedom of Information Act.
[ posted anonymously for reasons left as an exersize for the class ]
How was what you were doing breaking the law?
Having worked in the defense industry as well, part of the game was that in taking the job, you elected to give up some of your rights for the purpose of national defense. I could have been required to take a lie detector test to keep my job at any time, something a private employer couldn't do legally. I never for once felt that my communications were truly private, same as with my current non-defense employer. What applies in the world of employment and to contractors associated with the DoD is going up against different rules than what a private citizen can expect.
Having been on the receiving end of such a wiretap notification (not of my personal communications, but having innocently stumbled into someone else's wiretap), I can tell you that it is disturbing to receive one. But it was good to know that the FBI, at least, did follow the law in that case.
The British wanted (and still do)
the ability to read everyone's email..
-- The Funk, The Whole Funk, And Nothing But The Funk
Ah, I remember that movie. Besides being entertaining, it served as a reminder that the people in power use one definition of "enemy of the state" when selling these power grabs and quite another when utilizing them.
I have participated in discussions like this in other forums and have recieved threats against myself and my family from these people who claim to espouse "liberty."
"The lurkers support me in e-mail...."
/.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
Actually there is. I can't remember how long it is, but they have to either refuse (and state why) or comply within a set period. (I know it's less than six months.)
---
DO NOT DISTURB THE SE
Carnivore is a product of necessity. It's workings have to do icky things like scan all emails; how else could you differentiate different emails passing through the system?
Incorrect. It is a trivial task for the ISPs themselves to put up some kind of simple packet filter for this type of e-mail traffic, and does not necessitate the addition of some black box to do the filtering for them.
Prediction: It won't matter. The FBI will get their way.
Just of curiousity: Does any other country out there have something similar to the Freedom of Information Act? One of the few things that we've done that makes me proud of my country and less sarcastic about the state our 'democracy' is in.
You are more than the sum of what you consume.
You are more than the sum of what you consume.
Desire is not an occupation.
I'll bet Carnivore looks for PGP keys and snarf's 'em up too.
So? That's the point of public key cryptography. Having your public key doesn't allow them to decrypt anything you send, nor to forge signatures from you. You don't need Carnivore to get public keys, they're supposed to be published as widely as possible.
-- The Funk, The Whole Funk, And Nothing But The Funk
every time i read about these sorts of systems, i have these weird mixed feelings about them. on the one hand, i don't want anyone looking through my stuff without my permission. on the other hand, i want to feel secure knowing that the government to which i pay taxes is doing what it can to protect me from harm. how can i as a citizen demand that the government have the utmost respect for my privacy when demanding that respect cripples its ability to protect me?
if timothy mcveigh had sent an email about 1 federal plaza, would that picture of the fireman and the bloody little girl ever been taken?
if he had and there had been no such thing as carnivore in place, would we have kicked ourselves about it?
sometimes this reminds me of when my friends would come over in middle school and forget their cigarettes at my house. i tried to hide them in my room from my mother, and i'd throw a fit about how it was my room and she should stay out if she went in there to put away my laundry or whatever, but i was really worried that she would find the smokes and yell at me for something i didn't do (which i didn't). her response was always, "what are you so worried about if you've got nothing to hide?"
what are we so worried about?
london is drowning and i live by river
I beg to differ. If you are plotting to blow up a building or a church or a school or a town then it is most CERTAINL the government's business. It's my business too, especially if I live somewhere in the vicinity.
I've got to give you credit. You are the most determined troll I've ever encountered on Slashdot, and that's saying a lot. Ignoring all logic or questions regarding your position, continually spouting emotionally loaded yet factually vacant arguements, using the same tired rhetoric over and over again... a classic!
Here's a thought:
:-) Of course, since the recipient could easily tell that a trapazoid deform was used and ignore the noise, 'decryption' wouldn't really be a problem.
1) It is difficult and processor intensive to turn pictures into something that can be represented digitally. My computer knows that cat.jpg is a file, and can show me a bunch of dots that looks like a cat, but the fact that it is a cat is unknown to the computer.
2) It is even more difficult to attempt to pattern-match such things when the computer only has one image to work from. (Ever notice how OCR does not work on scans of handwriting (not things like Palm[whatever]?)
3) A picture of a page of text occupies significantly more memory than a text file of text (on the order of >5 to 1). Consequently, a picture consumes more bandwidth and takes longer to pass through any particular point in the network.
So why don't we just send around images of hand-written notes (or images of text using uncommon fonts), possibly deformed using PS5/GIMP/MS Paint or whatever? And XOR/ROT13/encrypt the file for good measure. Surely, carnivoire, echelon, and all the other things peeking into our transmissions would be overwhelmed by having to process >5x more data. (Yes, this doesn't work too well over cell phones and such, but this would work decently now and even better so in the future as high speed access becomes more readily available). Unless they get humans to look at the images (practically defeated by using masks similar to what the Japaneese electronic porn industry currently does) or invest in more hardware, I think this method might work.
I'm also thinking that 0.3mm pencil on textured newsprint at 16.7 million grays with a trapazoid deform would be nearly impossible to electronically sniff but would easily get the message across unprocessed
Just a thought...
M5B
There are 1.1... kinds of people.
Even in the extreme cases of totalitarian regimes, the ones guilty of mass murders, law enforcement relies far more on the paranoia it instills in the people by the rumors of its omniscient surveillance to do the policing job that individual investigations and torture cannot. Of course, I'm *not* saying that the USA has joined the ranks of history's infamous police states, but I am saying that "law enforcement" in the US has learned the benefit of the undisproveable rumorn that "they hear and see everything".
It really is an implicit threat to the rights of private correspondence enjoyed by US citizens under the 4th Amendment. You cannot trust a tool that, at a keystroke, becomes a dragnet logging everyone's communications indiscriminately. Nor can you trust an agency that develops such a tool and resists calls to disclose its full capabilities.
Drugs, crack, hash.
I guess then we'll just have to make sure every email we send out is flagged, won't we?
Kiddie porn, Natalie Portman, Communist Party, Karl Marx.
I just got myself a new signature.
Mmmm.. Donuts
--- Submission is feudal.
"The Internet is made of cats."
Out of cusirosity, what makes you think that the government cannot crack strong (Read: PGP) encryption methods?
Power corrupts... absolute power is kinda neat!
The FBI isn't necessarily interested in you, but the local police are more likely to be. How easily will data make its way from the federal to the state, county, or city level? For that matter, does the FBI need a warrant to do traffic analysis, which they can argue is analogous to just looking at the addresses on envelopes rather than reading mail?
Called:
/.? I can leave teh office RIGHT NOW. :)
United States District Court
for the District of Columbia
333 Constitution Avenue, N.W.
Washington, D.C. 20001
No one there knows what I am talking about. Where is this thing? Any interest in me getting a scoop for
In most cases, not by much, right? Both phone and e-mail (when through dial-up connections) are just transmissions of sound over a phone line.
Since the USPS is going to give each citizen a free web-based email account (see CNN), then can Carnivore tap that email? And how can you stop it from intercepting USPS email if it reads all of it in the first place?
I doubt the USPS would route its' e-mail ONLY through its' own servers. At some point or another, it would touch an Earthlink, AOL, etc. server. If they were using Carnivore, guess what? Your message just got logged even though the USPS wasn't monitoring. Additionally, I highly doubt that the USPS would gain any preferential treatment over other e-mail services. Physical and electronic mail are very different.
Let's just say that there's a scenario where the FBI has a warrant to search the e-mail of Fred Kazyncski because he is a suspect in a federal case. Let's also say that the FBI is being honest and didn't have Carnivore installed until the judge granted this warrant. Now, the FBI goes over to Earthlink, whoever, and starts up Carnivore on that network. Not only is Fred being monitored, so is every other local Earthlink user. And because Carnivore is looking at both incoming and outgoing traffic, any mail which gets routed through this Earthlink machine is being monitored as well. Supposing the FBI logged all messages (they couldn't know who might be talking to Fred, after all), they suddenly have a wealth of information. And hey, an unrelated (to this case) message went through there, from Muhammed to Chang about the Korean and Iraqi biological warfare programs. Now, the FBI being what it is (suspicious), these two are then monitored on their Mindspring and Netcom servers. Wow, we're quickly approaching total coverage of the US. This is why the monitoring solutions must be implemented by the ISPs and be specific to single users.
While email obtained illegally could be used to tip off another agency (i.e. NSA, local cops, whatever) any judge would throw away any evidence obtained by that method as fruit of a poisioned tree. In other words, that evidence would not have been found if not for the illegal email sniffing / whatever, and therefore is unuseable. But still, I encrypt **all** email, except to those people who **still** dont have PGP, and those people I harass and tell them to get it :-)
**DIGRESSION**
The IRS is a little bit of a different scenario. The FBI is a government sactioned organization. The IRS is a completely illegal and unchecked organization. Even if congress hadn't granted the exemption, the IRS could have ignored congresses orders because the IRS is completely free of law. The IRS has the following unconstitutional rights:
1) search and siezure without a warrent (including use of illegal IRS swat teams)
2) they can take money from your bank accounts and other assests without premission from either you or the banks, or the courts (which by the way is a direct violation of the 5th Amendment which clearly states "nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.")
3) They are above all laws. They can burn your house down while they illegally search it for files and they don't have to answer to you or anyone else.
Not to mention that Income Tax is unconstitutional, but I believe I have digressed enough.
Just out of curiosity: how can a one-time post of the Bill of Rights be a 'troll?'
Isn't the Bill of Rights what this 'carnivore' crap is all about?
And why in the world -- aside from the carnivore crap -- would posting a Bill of Rights (in the proper context) be a 'troll?'
Is a troll because no collateral information is attached? Because the author didn't write something like: "That's the Bill of Rights. That's what this carnivore crap is all about."
The preceding message should be moderated up because had sense enough *not* to attach any collateral info. The Bill of Rights (in this context, at least) pretty much speaks for itself.
You're a contextualizer, aren't you? You have a real inability to deal with any content that's not properly contextualized.
In the case of Slashdot, you probably need a context for all postings, right? You need to have the context properly defined -- and linked precisely to the message it refers to -- or, as far as your concerned, it's a troll.
Do you even understand what a 'troll' is?
Is this message a troll?
I doubt that everyone would read other's e-mail. I have no doubts that some would. And working for an investigative agency is bound to break down inhibitions in that area. Of course, you might need to be awfully bored...
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
The FBI claimed (during the Carnivore Congressional hearing last week) that the ISP which was being sued (presumably Earthlink/Mindspring), and the ISPs in every case where Carnivore had been used so far, were not able to provide the FBI with the data they needed. Given the almost trivial effort needed to track e-mail, and other internet activity (e.g. web browsing), this shows that either Carnivore is after much more than it is currently assumed, or the FBI wants a broad surveilance device, not limitted by the traditional court-order wire tapping.
As a matter of fact, one of the points made during the Judiciary committee hearing was that currently the FBI has to go the phone companies with the court order to get information about a particular phone number. The phone companies will then give them the information, thus making sure that the FBI only gets the information specified in the court order. In contrast, Carnivore (as far as the public knows) has access to much more information, and we have to trust the FBI to only pay attention to what is authorised. This is one of the main issues as far as the fourth amendment is concerned, because the regulations under which the FBI requires the instalation of Carnivore are meant only for the above scenario of the phone companies providing the info themselves.
Learn all about it at the C-SPAN web site (the hearing from Monday, July 24).
We are not discussing a program that allows the government to "read the mail of people who are known or suspected terrorists". We are discussing Carnivore, which is a black box containing Ghu knows what capabilities. The FBI simply wants us to trust their assurances that the two are equivalent. Sorry; I base trust on past performance, and by that criterion I would no more allow the FBI to install Carnivore boxes than I would allow my teenage daughter to work in Bill Clinton's office.
/.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
You're absolutely right. If idiots like you get their way, though, we'll soon live in a world where our government will have free reign to do whatever they want to us, whenever they want. In Ben's time, they did it - well, because they were the government. They had the power to tell you to silence you, sieze your property at the slightest excuse, throw you in jail for no particular reason, or otherwise do whatever they wanted because they had the power to do so.
Since that time, we're progressively limited government's powers; until sometime around the early 20th century in America, when the federal government started grabbing for more an more powers - the power to tax; to limit discourse; to sieze property and silence critics without a need to pay attention to all those annoying civil liberties.
"Great men are not always wise: neither do the aged understand judgement." Job 32:9
btw: I want to see a source on this
Veteran, Bermuda Triangle Expeditionary Force, 1992-1951
Also, since the FBI gave SDSC/PICS and my name as one of the groups being approached...
I can tell you that the group of people we have already approached (and have agreed in principle to participate) will be quite acceptable to you.
We have no interest in performing a "Clipper"-style review. No clearances, no secrecy, and no restrictions on anything we choose to publish are going to be requirements, or we won't play. And that would certainly send an interesting message.
Getting the source code, or at least doing a full reverse-engineer of Carnivore is the best of all possible worlds. But doing the reverse-engineer would be more difficult without doing the analysis of the existing product.
Since the FBI has repeatedly insisted that they only install Carnivore when the ISP can't give them what they need, they should have no objections to an open-source application that even an idiot-ISP could download, compile and install.
Don't trust me, and don't trust any panel of experts, but anything that *we* are involved in will provide enough information for a *qualified* person to do their own analysis.
One bit's traffic analysis. If, say, you happen to be a known member of the Osama bin Ladin Official Fan Club, they're going to be at least mildly interested in *who* you're talking to and when, particularly if your other activities make them curious.
The other is that many criminals aren't that paranoid all the time. Do you think that many Mafia folks aren't aware of the fact that police tap their phones... and that, despite this, this is still a major source of evidence vs organized crime?
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
The law specifies deadlines for agencies to respond to requests, but as this example illustrates, you may have to file a lawsuit in federal court to get any action. Some of it is due to insufficient funding and some of it is deliberate delay or refusal to release information.
how else could you differentiate different emails passing through the system?
How bout using software installed on ISP systems instead of some ominous black box clearly put their by watchers to avoid being watched. And once again I have to wonder if Cringley has his finger on a better pulse than EPIC or EFF with his article suggesting the FBI wants to start the process of creating an off switch for this newfangled 'internet'.
The main point here is not that the FBI is tapping e-mails. The general trend in National Intelligence (*muffled laughter*) is obviously going to yeild things like Carnivore, but what groups like the ACLU want is what we all want, KNOWLEDGE! We simply want to know what the hell is going on in this little black box, because we as citizens have a responsibility to watch the watchers.
Red tape or not, there should have been more information available on this little gizmo before the sudden accross the board implementation came about. Steady encroachments on rights are bad enough, but sudden sweeping moves deserve intense and widely publisized scrutiny in my opinion. Sets a good example...
Carnivore was designed for ISPs that couldn't quickly have such a thing in place. I don't beleive that Carnivore is mandatory...
--
Now imagine automating this process. Now imagine operating overseas in some hellhole where the LEOs are all corrupt.
I wrote parts of this stuff
i believe that was earthlink, not mindspring.
london is drowning and i live by river
In reference to your nick: Such as being a member of a known cult?
Free BeOS, runs from a Linux partition
Trust is not exactly the word I would choose. And there is significant evidence that the power to easily tap lines has been abused more than once already. Of course there's always an excuse, but if it were convincing then they could have gotten a warrant from a judge. (After all, they even get to pick which judge to ask!)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
I rember when a couple people filed under the freedom of information act to get the forumla the IRS uses to select people for an audit. Naturally the IRS objected, and even after a court victory, they still refused to give out that information. What did they do? They ran to congres and asked them to make and exemption, which they did. Bastards. I can only guess what is going to happen here... again.
----------------------------------------------
I don't really mind double posts on
Carnivore is broad in scope; everyone's e-mail is monitored.
Not without a court order.
Well, the Carnivore boxes would be in place in a way that they could conceivably monitor all email traffic. The FBI claims this is pre-emptive and would/could only be used with a court order. I don't think anyone thinks for a second that the FBI would only use Carnivore boxes with a court order.
Furthermore, the Carnivore boxes will cause substantial difficulties. How are you going to intercept all of AOL's email ?? You would need a daemon on the mail server, or a box that intercepts all traffic going to all of the email servers (which are typically set up in a load balancing manner). The likely incompetence of the FBI alone should stop this from happening. Who really thinks their Carnivore boxes will be able to intercept email without interfering with normal email usage.
Further, a failure on the Carnivore boxes (intentional or not) could shut down the vast majority of US internet traffic.
It is a stupid plan, plain and simple. It should never be allowable under the 4th Amendment to the US Constitution. It is unreasonable to assume that since you might need to intercept anyone's email at any time - you have a right to place an infrastructure that can intercept EVERYONE's email.
When law enforcement obtains a court order to monitor your mail, they can either look only on the outside of the envelope or have the authority to open and read your mail. Likewise, the difference between a wiretap and a "pen register" order is that the former allows law enforcement to listen to the conversations, while a pen register order (or trap-and-trace order) is limited to capturing the digits of the party you are calling.
In the mail case, there is a definite barrier between the address information and the content, so limiting law enforcement to the proper level of monitoring is fairly easy. In the telephone-tapping case, though, the growing use of voice-response systems that accept DTMF digits makes it harder for law enforcement to avoid capturing content -- and that content can be my bank account number and the PIN associated with it so that someone tapping my line with a pen-register order could access the account without due process.
On the Internet, the intrusion goes beyond that of the pen-register tap. With the telephone company, the telephone switch can isolate one line from the rest of the lines in the central office. There is no such isolation in the Internet for e-mail. Software would have to monitor EVERYTHING.
It's the requirement about looking at everything, even if you only want address information, that make Carnivore such a problem.
The solution would be for the Congress to pass a law that would require all electronic mail programs to encrypt all messages so that a pen-register order is guaranteed to capture only address information.
Can you imagine the howls?
By the same logic, everyone should be kept under constant surveillance to prevent murders. Or, better yet, develop and install in everybody's brain an implant that will stun you if you even think of killing someone. I'm sure that would cut down the murder rates, but would it make us any happier? No.
A zero loss policy can only be implemented by an establishing a police state with no civil rights at all.
*camera pans to an avid /. reader reading about the Carnivore disclosure hearing*
*cut to the reader leaping in a taxi to make it down to the courthouse in time for the "public" hearing*
*wipe to the reader getting there to an empty room, a tumbleweed blows by*
The guard said the so called "public" hearing lasted about 20 mintues.
What a crock. It's like disclosing something, but only flashing it in the public's face for a second. Luckily they have a transcript. but what can be said in 20 mintues? Not much, I bet.
*Fade to avid reader spitting on the judge's bench as he leaves*
--
Care about electronic freedom? Consider donating to the EFF!
If anyone (especially the moderators or someone from /. staff) would like a scoop on thsi story for free, I am willing to go down there. Just called the judge's chambers!
The hearing is going on right now in Courtroom 16 at the Federal Courthouse at 333 Constiution. Any interest?
Yet they did not.
And this is typical behavior for the FBI. They believe that the law does not apply to them, and behave accordingly.
A rogue law enforcement agency that believes that it is above the law and above the Constitution does not serve us, no matter how well they protect us from terrorist threats. Not that such rogue law enforcement agencies would ever care what we think about them. After all, when you have a badge and a gun, who is going to stop you? "Who shall watch the watchers?".
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
Maybe Joe Schmoe belongs to an environmental or animal rights organization, a non-mainstream political or religious group, corresponds with people in "terrorist" countries. There are many things that can put you on a watch list.
thank you for writing the truth. People who want the nanny state should be allowed to set up a collective or whatever elsewhere, preferabbly somewhere isolated like the Faukland Islands. They can set up their little society where Daddy / Gubmit will make sure nothing bad ever happens and no one thinks unapproved thoughts.
Now imagine the same thing, except infinately worse. Board FBI person is sitting in his office late at night. Well, he has access to the carnivore system, so he drops in a few new rules. Save any mail with the words 'Natelie Portman.' There, now he has some porn to look at. Okay, but that wasn't enough. Now he wants to know what email his wife/girlfriend/lover sends around, since he does not have her password. Set up a rule to save her mail, and boom, there ya go. Now he is having lots of fun. He just starts scanning any mail with his name on it. Looks for anything with "last night was so good," "i want to fu" or "my password is." Now everything is getting really cool! You should see all the emails he is collecting! There are some really cool things people are sending around the web. Next he starts reading the mails of one of his cute coworkers, and then that girl he dated in high school and never got over (something about how he was a geek and had a really small penis, so now he will teach her and maybe even forge a few emails i her name)
Where does it stop? He can continue going. No one else would ever know he was doing it. The mails get through. Not 'everyone's' privacy has been invaded.. just those who happened to send a few emails that matched a few rules set up by some guy late at night.
What do you think?
/. is a commercial entity. goto slashdot.com
What? You say it could never happen?
It happened to those who wished to free the black man, an effort that threatened the economic well-being of many well-heeled industrialists and Southern planters. Why do you think it could not happen to those who wish to free the code? You honestly believe that this does not present as big a threat to entrenched powers?
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
And that would do ... what? As long as the FBI doesn't distribute Carnivore binaries outside of the FBI, there'd be no violations of the GPL.
Point: Sometimes administrative heel-dragging, while blamed on "administrative red tape", can be purposeful behavior. If there is "red tape" involved, it is because the FBI heirarchy wants it to be. I'm sure they did not invent this red tape just for the Carnivore case -- after all, it's institutionalized -- but it's there for a reason, and that reason is to be as an excuse for non-responsiveness to the public.
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
I'd be surprised if there isn't at least one gaping hole in the hole that basically neccesitates obscurity to prevent either sabotage or abuse (in the case of the latter, I expect that the flaw would be intentional: just because they can't use it as evidence, doesn't mean they aren't inclined to listen anyhow...)
Intolerant people should be shot.
When a federal law enforcement agency does not obey the law, we must raise the question, "who's watching the watchers?".
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
Yeah, so? Same company.
Granted, you can always summarize documents, but sometimes the sheer black and white effrontery of a government bureaucrat's abuse of power, in his own handwriting, is the most effective way of communicating.
Note that here in the United States, government documents are explicitly in the public domain. You can copy them in any way you wish, and use them in any way you wish, at least those that you know about and can get your hands upon. There is no concept here similar to "Crown copyright".
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
But you can compare this to a phone conversation, which does require an explicit warrant to monitor.
How does E-mail differ from a phone conversation?
Rick B.
Computers are intellectual amplifiers, in the same sense that a fork lift is a physical amplifier; they both allow you to handle loads you could not handle unassisted.
The most dangerous aspect of "Computer Crime" is that it is really "Thought Crime" in the sense that Orwell meant in "1984". The problem with "Thought Crimes" is that there is no way to prove you didn't commit them. Example: FBI seizes your computer, they 'find' child pornography on the machine. Go ahead, prove that they planted the evidence. Everything on a hard drive is ones and zero's and as such it can ALWAYS be faked.
I have a personal friend who has been doing police work for 20 years. When I asked him why he quit doing narcotics work he explained that he got tired of framing people. "Look" he said, "drug dealers aren't stupid, they don't keep drugs in their own homes. Every time you read about a bust where the narcotics agents break down a dealers door and find drugs you can just about bet that they brought the evidence along with them."
Law enforcement does not need Carnivore for the same reason that they really don't need to decrypt messages; traffic analysis alone is enough for them to learn almost everything about you. All they need to know is who you are talking to and when you talk to them. This is one of the main reasons that the US has lifted the export restrictions on data.
Carnivore is just snoopy people who want to spy on everybody. Given the chance, they would read everybody's snail mail - not because they would get useful information but just because they could; that is how stupid, petty people behave.
Everybody who believes that with Carnivore the government will only read the mail they are authorized to read is entitled to their belief. I - on the other hand - quit believing in the Tooth Fairy a number of years ago.
That statement should be amended right after 'gather' with "...in a court of law...". Just because evidence gathered by carnivore cannot be used in court does not mean that FBI analysts can't use it. Hell, just because the email is legal doesn't mean the FBI can't use it.
For instance, suppose I'm sending out emails supporting drug reform. The FBI, gunning for a pedophile on my ISP, scoops up my messages. Even though what I am doing is legal, even though the feds don't have a warrant, I could easily be added to a database of possible drug users at the FBI or, even more nefariously, those messages could be reported to my local police (or my boss) who would then keep an eye on me for something they could use in a court of law.
Such an ability would be stunningly simple to incorporate into Carnivore with keyword searches, nobody has to read it unless it gets flaged by the search.
By the tone of this post you might be led to believe I don't trust the FBI... you would be abso-fucking-lootly correct.
Insanity is the last line of defence for the master diplomat. But you have to lay the groundwork early.
Puh-leeeeeeze. Unless the FBI all of a sudden raises its number of employees by a factor of ten thousand or so, surveillance on every American citizen is not possible.
Someone else has already pointed out the activites (mostly politically oriented) that could bring you under a watchful eye, using such a system; I'd be more concerned with unscrupulous "gubmnit" employees using it for personal gain, malicious intent, or entertainment. What happens when Sally Federalintern decides she's got a crush on some guy, and starts dumping his privacy for her own little stalking attempts? Or when Joe Supervisor decides he's going to find out who amongst his friends and acquaintances is gay, so he can start a vigilante gay-bashing club?
Any system that can invade privacy wrongly will be used to invade privacy wrongly, because a sizeable percentage of the population is made up of immoral scum (or even people with weak moments and bad judgement), and the body of federal employees is drawn from that population.
Karma: Excellent, but still won't get you laid.
no text
Actually it is possible for a government to do this kind of thing, and some governments have found it desirable. An example is the former East German (DDR) government's Stasi secret police. After Communism fell, the unified German regime opened up the Stasi records and people were shocked at how many of their neighbors had been snitching on them.
It worked kind of like Amway: Joe recruits Mary, Mary recruits five of her friends, they each recruit five, etc. There's a threat of blackmail for those who resist being recruited. These people didn't have to be on the Stasi payroll; they were public-spirited citizens. Of course, half the people being snitched upon were also working for the Stasi, but the Stasi liked this feature. It kept everyone on their toes.
The other interesting thing that came out was the level of detail that the Stasi agents was recording. Incredibly trivial stuff. Not that the Stasi used most of this trivia. That wasn't the point. In techie terms, they were interested in Granularity. Hi-rez surveillance.
BTW, the document, among others, did show rather conclusively that the FBI, State Department, and the office of the president did know about the impending attack.
but it's not "idiots like me" that invented suitcase nuke bombs, biological weapons, and Ryder trucks
No indeed, the first two were invented by government munitions developers. The last is not really all that relevant to the discussion as stolen vehicles are even more anonymous than rented ones.
Just as a point of reference though, somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000 Americans die in traffic accidents each year (sorry, I don't recall the accurate figures and am too lazy to look them up). How many US citizens were killed by terrorists in the entire last decade? Probably not even 1,000. Should we therefore ban cars?
IT IS THE DUTY OF THE GOVERNMENT TO PROTECT ME AND MY FAMILY
And what, pray tell, constrains a government to perform its "duty"? There is no such thing as absolute safety, any more than there is absolute freedom. It's all relative and there is a balance to be struck. Where that balance lies depends on many things such as socially accepted values and technological capabilities. Simply pompously proclaiming the "the government has a duty" will acheive nothing, the work of building the institutions that ensure the good behaviour of the government is far harder than that.
What kind of a personal tragedy will it take for you to understand that there are certain realities that make your Franklinesque fantasy world a logistical impossibility?
More to the point, what kind of national obscenity will it take to open your eyes to the danger of government misbehaviour?
What killed more people last century (and every century before), terrorism or unrestrained government? (If you answer terrorism, you have obviously forgotten the "big three" murderers of the 20th century, Hitler, Stalin and Mao).
I agree that those who refuse to live by the rules of a civilized society and commit willful murder and mayhem should lose the protection of the said society's rules, but that doesn't justify abandoning those rules for everyone. The issue here is not whether law enforcement agancies should be allowed to spy on known or suspected (provided there is good, solid reason for suspicion) killers, the issue is whether an untrustworthy agency should be allowed to spy on everyone in the country. If you say "yes", consider that you are putting in place the tools for a Despot who may kill you with no more compunction than the terrorist you fear.
Just because the US democracy has never fallen to totalitarian rule does not mean it can - after all it happened in Russia and Germany both in the 20th century.
Power corrupts... absolute power is kinda neat!
"does not mean it can" should, of course, have read "does not mean it cannot". Too quick to click, and missed "preview" to boot. *sigh*
Easy - get us the "source" and /. readers will gladly build one - if it doesnt work.... then we know that it is once again time to overthrow the fat useless overpaid pigs in washington - and reclaim our freedom.
-damn that just setoff a crap load of flags with echelon via carnivore... i think someone just entered my house.... gotta go. call 911!!
So, when you receive a message that has the following headers:
Received: from mailsrv.myhouse.net (Mail Server) by out.mail.bigisp.net (Mail Server) with ESMTP id GABLDEGOOK for <blakestah@myhouse.net>; Wed, 2 Aug 2000 15:37:28 -0400
Received: from out.mail.bigisp.net (Mail Server) by carnivore.mail.bigisp.net (Carnivore Listening Device) with ESMTP id GABLDEGOOK for <blakestah@myhouse.net>; Wed, 2 Aug 2000 15:34:12 -0400
Received: from carnivore.mail.bigisp.net (Carnivore Listening Device) by pop.bigisp.net (Mail Server) with ESMTP id GABLDEGOOK for <blakestah@myhouse.net> Wed, 2 Aug 2000 15:33:03 -0400
Received: from your.friends.comp.bigisp.net (Mail Server) by pop.bigisp.net (Mail Server) with ESMTP id GABLDEGOOK for <blakestah@myhouse.net>; Wed, 2 Aug 2000 15:34:12 -0400
You'll understand why that may not be enough. (Note to nitpickers: I probably screwed up those headers. It's an example. I dunno exactly how they are generated. I guessed. It gets the point across.)
Just because your network doesn't have carnivore installed on it, doesn't mean that one of the networks your packets goes through doesn't. Unless you're absolutely sure that none of your packets will ever come in contact with carnivore.
But I wouldn't expect your e-mail to actually have a Carnivore header. In fact, I'd doubt that Carnivore even leaves headers, and even if it does, it'll probably be something seemingly innocent like mailhub4.bigisp.net. Large-key encryption offers better protection than a private mail server. Just make sure that anyone you'd ever like to talk with gets your key in meatspace somehow, or instead gets it through SSL or something. I'll bet Carnivore looks for PGP keys and snarf's 'em up too.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
Carnivore is the email equivalent of a phone-tapping system. Under federal law, your wireless phone service provider is required to be able to give you a tap; this was quite a major change for some systems. The FBI needs wireless phone tapping capability for all systems to perform its duties. The same goes for email - it needs to be able to tap your email. You have the option of an in-house system or an FBI-provided system. Earthlink chose one of their own writing. If you can't/don't want to/don't know how to institute one of your choice, then you get the FBI's solution by default.
I hereby propose that we make GNU Herbivore - a system that provides the requirements of the FBI (email monitoring with a court order) so that those who wish to view the source, etc. can feel safe. This would eliminate the problem. That means you, Open Source community!
(And please don't call this post a troll. It's not.)
It's a question of what is an acceptable loss in return for civil rights.
Zero loss? If so, ban everything and go for a totalitarian police state.
Any loss? Probably not a good solution either, but if a mistake is to made, it's better that the laws are too liberal than too strict.
thousands upon thousands of people with a biological bomb.
What do you think will happen to civil rights if a major city gets a-bombed? Do you think those rights would be restored?
If people all banded together to have one e-mail account for a given group, accessed it via an anonymous connector, and then all wrote e-mails in the same style... perhaps this would be an erstwhile "solution" to the problem? After all, the gov't couldn't necessarily determine who wrote it. Granted a pact against torture would be required... it might be a start though... Call each group an Anti-Carnivore Cell. Granted it wouldn't be as effective as blowing up Parliament.
Oops, I'm in trouble thanks to that last comment!
FBI: Don't worry! This isn't Britain! Say whatever you want about King George. That's why you have a First Amendment!
Puh-leeeeeeze. Unless the FBI all of a sudden raises its number of employees by a factor of ten thousand or so, surveillance on every American citizen is not possible.
This isn't about the FBI looking at everything that everyone does. It's a matter of principle--what they're doing is wrong.
Even if it were, why would the government bother? They've got better things to do than watch you defile yourself in front of electronic porn.
Well, for one thing, law enforcement officials are often prying power-hungry individuals that get their kicks from snooping on people. But far more importantly, what if I say something the government doesn't like. You've heard of Joe McCarthy no doubt? I disagree completely with Communism but people have the right to believe it if they want! Hell, people can preach it from the rooftops if they please. But our government wouldn't allow something like that. They have a Jesus Christ complex (we must save the world from evil!)
Personally, I think that the only people that need to be monitored are those who are worried about the government monitoring them.
Your lack of understanding about human nature floors me.
By expressing worries, they've expressed that they are probably doing something illegal or extralegal.
This is so much bullshit that I won't even touch it. Are you really that arrogant? I don't want people poking their noses into my business, no matter how innocent I am.
Call your ISP and ask them about their policy! Ask them if they have ever been asked to install it, what their policy is on devices like it, and if they would install it if asked. You might be suprised (or not). My ISP transferred me to five different people, after which I was told to mail the abuse department. (I was told a bunch of BS first, like that Carnivore is not installed on their network, but rather somewhere else and therefore they can do nothing about it etc...). Interesting ain't it? CALL THEM AND FIND OUT! And encrypt everything! It will make scanning impractical. And to those people without a PGP key, get one! There's no reason not to! Absolutely no cost at all...
Don't hit your thumb with that "presumption"!
They can snoop all they want.
They need a warrant to use the snooping directly as evidence against you in a court of law.
It's the other uses that scare me.....
Rick B.
We've received a couple of emails from users asking us if it's all for real (I work for an ISP) and apparantly this site is sending out plenty of emails to inform the public...
http://www.lp.org/action/carnivore/
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Do not meddle in the affairs of Dragons, as you are crunchy and taste good with ketchup.
..if any? If The g-men can sniff you isp account, couldn't you just use hotmail or whatever to do your naughty bits? My fundemental objection to Carnivore is that it will give a lot of access to much more data than is readily apparent, and that it is likely to end up in some pretty odd places. For example, many states sell the names and addresses and makes and years of cars that you have to give to be granted a drivers licence. So marketers could guess your income from your zip code, and know the when you would be likely to need a new car, and target you that way. Imagine Carnivore data being sold, so that everyone who wrote an email mentioning a product finds themselves targeted by spammers- Is there a policy stopping the feds from selling data that they gather on us?
This is really a non-item, since we all have a pretty good idea of how Carnivore works. It is probably very simple, just scanning for certain headers that will trigger it and then turn on the collection mechnism to collect that email and file it away.
What makes you think this is how Carnivore works? I've seen no evidence that would support this supposition. Its certainly one theory, but we don't know what exactly it is supposed to do, and what data it works on. You might be completely wrong. That';s why getting some details released under the FOIA is a good idea.
If it does anything more than that, I really doubt they would admit it. Do you really think they are going to say,
"Yeah, we set it up to scan for words like Bomb and President, and then we take names, put them in a secret database, and monitor everything that person does." ?
Well on NPR radio news this morning, it was reported that Carnivore does indeed monitor all email going to and coming from individuals. Maybe that was FBI FUD, maybe its closer to how Carnivore actually works. Sounds like it would be worth actually finding out. If it really only targets individuals rather than sniffing every email sent then its a very different system from the one you've supposed.
Sailing over the event horizon
For those who didn't see the Congressional hearing on Carnivore on C-SPAN last week (you can watch all 3 hrs and 15 minutes of it from here), it showed one thing - it is currently not known what exactly Carnivore does.
Almost everyone assumes that Carnivore tracks e-mail - this may not be all. During the hearing suggestions and speculations covered a lot of TCP/IP protocols - from the near admission of the FBI that they have tracked ftp transfers, through the constant mentioning by the FBI pannelists that they look at packets, to the tracking of http requests, streaming media server connections, etc.
One of the panelists, the CEO of a small ISP in the DC area, testified that it took one of his sysadmins about 3 lines of configuration code and half an hour to implement tracking of e-mail (incoming and outgoing) on the CEO's account, which would have satisfied the needs of the FBI if this is were the only thing Carnivore does. The fact that the ongoing Earthlink lawsuit was brought up allegedly because Earthlink was unable to provide the requested information to the FBI (with a valid court order and all), seems to indicate that Carnivore is after much more than simple e-mail.
Among other interesting things that came out at that hearing was the security aspect of Carnivore - no sysadmin in their right mind would welcome a "black box" to become part of their LAN, and at the same time be accessible remotely.
How bout using software installed on ISP systems instead of some ominous black box clearly put their by watchers to avoid being watched.
I saw an interview with an FBI representative who said that ISPs that were able to provide the data required by the warrant using their in-house resources would not have to install Carnivore.
Meanwhile, back in the real world, the FBI's pattern of behavior indicates that it is indeed a threat to law-abiding citizens. For an FBI official to propose to install some black box into the Internet takes as much cheek as a repeatedly-convicted embezzler applying for the position of chief accountant.
/.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
True, i personally think all of the little 'nodes' they are setting up at the isps are really just to index ALL the messages and send them to a data center to process the info.
;)
Think about it, with the massive amount of data coming in from just earthlink alone, and the need to correlate the data with their databases and the data acquired from other isps would mean that the only way carnivore would work would be if it gathered everything and sent it to a central location...
well, that's the way i would do it (oh, and don't forget the massive cluster you would need to run genetic algorithms on
Quoting from the article:
Attorney General Janet Reno said last week that technical specifications of the system will be disclosed to a "group of experts."
I seem to remember a similar situation with clipper/skipjack. The algorithm was too "sensitive" for public release, so they got a group of "experts" to reassure us. (sarcasm) World renown experts like Dorothy Deming. (/sarcasm) You may remember her as one of the encryption experts who looked at the skipjack and found (paraphrasing), "it looks fine by me, so stop worrying about backdoors!"
Somehow I did not find that reassuring then. And I have a feeling that I will not find the FBI's experts assurances convincing now, regarding Carnivore.
A dingo ate my sig...
Hey loser, you might as well not use that stupid cover of AC anymore. Your exclusive use of br as your sig makes me more assured of your assholism. That stupid sig and your stupid message has been broadcasted over every single slashdot story about carnivore, or napster. Dickweed, leave us alone.
Kris
botboy60@hotmail.com
Nerdnetwork.net
Kris
botboy60@hotmail.com
Nerdnetwork.net
Personally, I think that the only people that need to be monitored are those who are worried about the government monitoring them. By expressing worries, they've expressed that they are probably doing something illegal or extralegal. This is why I am (more or less) in favor of Carnivore. It's not the end of privacy in America by a longshot. People who believe that it is are probably conspiracy theorists who should go back to figuring out who shot JFK (hint: his initials were LHO.)
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759.
This is really ludicrous, and makes me quite happy I set up my own email server at home. The argument being fostered by the FBI is that they have a right to have a device in place that can be used to intercept email. This is like allowing the FBI to wiretap every phone line in the country, and trusting them to only turn on one of their phone taps when they have an appropriately obtained court order.
This is not about allowing criminals to hide. We in the US have a right to be secure in our persons and things against unreasonable search and seizure. The FBI would like us to think that they have a right to invade our privacy at their leisure.
Love your country, but never trust its government.
--Robert A. Heinlein.
Government is not reason, it is not eloquence, it is force; like fire, a troublesome servant and a fearful master. Never for a moment should it be left to irresponsible action.
--G. Washington January 7, 1790
If any of your email was intercepted by the feds, it's their responsibility under the law to notify you that they intercepted your electronic transmissions. (Whether it is over a phone line, a message on an answering machine, a caller ID entry or an email.) So the fact that you didn't receive such a notification either means they weren't tracing his emails to you, or that you'd have to believe the feds violated the law.
Okay, you got me...
-- The Funk, The Whole Funk, And Nothing But The Funk
-coyo da silly.
--------------------------------------------------
/.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
yeah but......they can do all the keyword searches they want out there - since NOBODY KNOWS HOW TO SPELL ANYMORE they'll never pick anything up!!!
Watch your step or I will drop you into a volcano like the BT infested scum that you are.
mwa-ha-ha!!
Yes, by law the public has a right to this information, but how would one know if all of the info is brought to the table?
will work for food
And yet some little schmoe from Asshole, Indiana thinks that he is so important...
200+ years ago, a government was founded on the basis of the idea that rights were retained by the people - "We The People" - making those Indiana schmoes the center of government power. Simply acknowledging that the government is not representative of the people should be a red flag to you. Why is it not?
By expressing worries, they've expressed that they are probably doing something illegal or extralegal. This is why I am (more or less) in favor of Carnivore.
How interesting -- that is precisely why I am dead-set against Carnivore. How many in law enforcement or in the courts take this sort of prejudicial approach?
And again, by posting anonymously, you have expressed a concern that you, too, could be a target. Perhaps not a government-OKd target -- well not THIS time, anyway. But who knows? In a decade or so, perhaps YOUR opinions will become politically unpopular. Good luck -- with the government you've asked for, you'll certainly need it. Or maybe then you'll thank me, and those like me, for what we sometimes call "eternal vigilance".
--
There's a pretty good opinion piece on MacOpinion titled The Number of the Beast" that you guys might find interesting. Talks about how the government has always been listening in on the Internet and points out some fairly interesting facts...
Check it out.
"Meddle not in the affairs of Dragons...for thou art crunchy and taste good with ketchup."
The FBI has been reluctant to reveal Carnivore details, partly on the grounds that such exposure would let programmers create their own, malicious Carnivore clones.
I rolled when I saw this. The Linux development community wrote a complete software environment, for god's sake...and the FBI doesn't think it can figure out how to put to together a glorified sniffer? What arrogance.
The mere ability of the FBI to snoop POP3/SMTP traffic should not be a suprise. Any punk with a packet sniffer can pull this off. Any punk with a packet sniffer can't drop a device in the middle of an ISP's network to perform such sniffing with. Just people you can load up a packet sniffer on your Win9x box doesn't mean you're going to capture anything other than the conversations your box is having with other boxes. And even hacking into a server on an ISP and setting up a packet sniffer there isn't going to give you the full view, because (if the ISP is worth it's weight in salt) the network is switched, so now you have to hack into the switch as well, figure out what port the machine is on, and make it a 'monitoring' port. Add a couple more switches, and capturing all the traffic is going to be cumbersome. The FUD surrounding Carnivore is enough. Please don't start adding to it with vague statements about 'punks' and 'packet sniffers'.
Prediction: It'll turn out that the failure to act on the FOIA request was just administrative red tape and such, and that there's nothing wrong/sinister going on here. Give them some time. The FBI is a beuracracy, and things move slowly. Besides, they probably gave their request to a summer intern :-P.
Free BeOS, runs from a Linux partition
It (potentially) only takes a single employee to monitor all people in the nation, provided they are fluent with computers and they aren't monitoring them all simultaneously, only adding files and switching back and forth to whoever is the biggest priority (percieved "threat") at a given time. Most of it is automated, with word and pattern searching you don't need to /read/ the bloody emails 'til you find something importnant. That's the point. Somebody pointed out here that they don't care about you're next week's shopping list. Bull caca!! They could know where you are at any moment, based on past communications and inferences, and how predictible a person you are. They are known to keep track of people who purchase "suspicious" items in case an odd crime comes up to which that can be linked,(like say a building blows up in my town and I just bought two large bags of fertilizer online three months ago;they'll knock down my door first, probably arrest me just on that) and are also known to keep track of people's political views in order to trail essentially the unpopular ones (they call them ones with "criminal associations" but we know that's bull)
Just to make the point, how many pedophiles has the FBI put away in the past couple decades? How many serial killers? And how many political dissidents? They care about all of us, they watch all of us, no that does not take immense resources, and yes we all have something to fear. The bureau is a menace, they are not "The Good Guys" because they are at the point where they are attempting to mandate how we think. In a democracy that is wrong, and the first step to restoring the US from so-called democracy status to democracy status is to remove the FBI menace.
Ever get the impression that your life would make a good sitcom?
Ever follow this to its logical conclusion: that your life is a sitcom?
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
Just go there, and keep good notes... I think a timely informed post after the hearing is just as valuable as a real time broadcast...
Here here....
I've come to the stunning conclusion that no federal or state agency with any investigative powers will ever be "trustable ". I don't trust the FBI scanning my e-mail any more than I would trust one of 'em to walk up in my house, grab a beer, and start looking through my computer while I'm out.
"God is REAL
Imagine an ISP (with a Carnivore box) that has the ex-spouse of an FBI agent as a customer. What prevents the agent from gathering information about the ex-spouse?
Imagine an FBI agent who has access to a Carnivore box bucking for a promotion. What prevents the agent from making fishing expeditions, and then presenting the information gained as tips from an anonymous source?
Imagine a loan shark who has loaned tens of thousands of dollars to an FBI agent with access to a Carnivore box. What prevents the agent from getting information (credit card numbers, blackmail-worthy details, information on the loan shark's enemies, etc.) through the box that will make the loan shark willing to forgive the debt?
Imagine an FBI agent whose spouse manages a business. What prevents the agent from using the Carnivore box to spy on the spouse's competitors or customers?
We don't know ... that's part of the problem.
--
send all spam to theotherwhitemeat@ropine.com
Why would anyone want these records released to the public??? If the real concern here is privacy of communication why would we want our emails publicly displayed?? I guess it's better to know what the spooks know about us, than to be guessing about it...
it only eats meat.
no, seriously. their first box was called omnivore, and it listened to everything. the new one is called carnivore, and it selectively listens. i think it's quite probable that the reason they are keeping it a secret is that it sucks so bad, and they don't want people to know how far behind they are. i bet omnivore was esniff.c, and that carnivore is a flat packet sniffer with keyword filters:
while (1)
if packet_contains_keyword(packet,"bomb") savepacket();
--
What happens when you outlaw guns
big brother is watching the boards.
Yankees suck. yep you know it.
Exactly. Why should e-mail be different? The FBI can only tap a specific phone number *after* showing just cause and obtaining a court order. Carnivore will pre-emptively monitor *all* e-mail traffic. Phone taps are narrow in scope; only the suspected bad guy's phone is tapped. Carnivore is broad in scope; everyone's e-mail is monitored.
An e-mail surveillance system that could be compared apples-to-apples with phone taps would be one whereby only traffic into or out of a specific mailbox was monitored. Imagine the FBI with phonetaps on every phone; that is what Carnivore wants to do.
This is a pretty basic distinction, but I guess it gets a little lost while you scream, "Won't someone think of the children!" at the top of your lungs. If you personally lost loved ones in OKC, I feel for you, but I don't think we should all just hand over our civil liberties as a result of that tragedy.
I'll bet when you grow up, you'll be a big shot advertising executive too. You've got quite a career ahead of you. Congratulations!
You know what to do with the HELLO.
You know what to do with the HELLO. ...
Help create an open-source world
Gee, look at all the mutilated body parts of children scattered around. What a bad deal. But at least nobody's privacy got violated!
Won't *somebody* think of the children?!
This point needs to be re-iterated from time to time: it doesn't matter how important you are; what matters is how easy it is to conduct surveillance on people. If you need special equipment and lots of people to monitor a single person, the resources will obviously be concentrated on only the most important targets. However, if you can do it practically automatically with minimal hardware and manpower, then even your "little schmoe from Asshole, Indiana" becomes a potential target.
First of all, he's important to people currently in the government. That's because he's a member of the electorate and the government wants desperately to get re-elected. Knowing Joe Schmoes' party affiliations, special interests and voting histories helps targeting the campaign.
A more sinister use of the e-mail snooping would be gathering dirt on your political or business competitors. History knows several examples (Nixon and allegedly Clinton admins, for instance) of this kind of abuse. This application would probably not affect your average Joe Schmoe, though, because he doesn't wield direct power or pose a direct threat.
Knowing Joe Schmoe's habits is also important to businesses. Why do you think they'd like you to tell them your name, e-mail address and sometimes even income and hobbies before they let you use their web services? Profiling people is a serious business today.
So, don't take comfort in thinking that you're not important enough...
Is an absolute necessity. This is a perfect example of where something as simple as a bug in an email collection routine could frame the wrong guy.... The "innocent don't have anything to hide" defense for an invasion of privacy is invalid - the Government is accountable to the people, not the other way around. The FBI should have to justify to us why they feel it necessary to snoop on our communications, rather than us having to justify why we don't want them in our ISPs
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
Such an ability would be stunningly simple to incorporate into Carnivore with keyword searches, nobody has to read it unless it gets flaged by the search.
This is it exactly. Your mail would be read by a machine. Machine or human I see no difference, I don't want anyone especially a government agency to be able to read my mail without an explicit search warrant. That I believe is a basic right.
Rick B.
e-mail and mail delivered by the US Postal Service are two very different things. There are no federal laws protecting e-mail in the same way that snail mail is protected. All of the complaints people lodge against Carnivore are based on the assumption that we have a "right to privacy," which stems from an interpretation of the 4th amendment's protection against unlawful search and seizure. (at least I think it's the 4th amendment.)
In any case, you can't compare e-mail to USPS mail. they are two completely different things, you shouldn't even think of them the same way.
Moller
The Cure of the ills of Democracy is more Democracy.
Erlang Developer and podcaster
What does this have to do with censorship?
This article should be in Privacy.
Browser? I barely know her!
I can think of no rebuttal more damning that simply to quote this statement, and invite the reader to let its implications sink in.
/.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
but since the internet is well .. the internet, and gov't organization's move ever so slowly wouldn't the hackers (crackers) have a field day with this ? think of all the havoc we could wreak with this ... the fbi probably wont know we've broken into carnivore and sending them randomized messages or what not ...
What good would a black helicopter do? If they're going after civilians at night, I suppose that it might work, but during the day, a black helicopter would kinda stand out against the sun. I'd think. But then again, helicopters aren't exactly noiseless. Unless they can be fairly far away, you'd either have to be VERY noisy to miss them or just mostly deaf.
If the helicopters are being used against other nations, then what good does them being "black" do? Radars can just detect them. Paint does nothing (useful) against radar. (Although black might obsorb some of the radar emission, I guess.)
Or does black mean covert? If black means covert, what did your uncle used to paint?
And wouldn't a helicopter done up to look like a CEO's private chopper be less suspicious than a black one?
Just to be partially on-topic, unlike black helicopters, a properly inplemented Carnivore would be unnoticible. Somewhere along the lines you "fork" the packets, a copy to carnivore, a copy on it's merry way. As far as the copy at the other end is concerned, it never strayed off course, even though a clone did. Much more scary than black helicopters - unless those helicopters are after more than just information.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
> upon millions of people in this country. And yet some little schmoe from Asshole, Indiana thinks
>that he is so important that the "gummint" has
>got dozens of agents watching his every move and reading every little piece of mail that he gets.
But, it's these sorts of paranoid people that probably are being watched. The FBI does want to
track those people, because those sorts of people are the same type of anti-"gummint" loonys that
blow up FBI buildings, live in WACO style armed compounds.
Now just because only a very small number of these paranoid loonys are dangerous, the FBI will track
all of them, just to be sure.
So what if you're not doing anything illegal? So what if you have a legitimate reason to use
encryption? If you do anything which they think is a bit sus, then let's track you just in case.
Yes, you have nothing to worry about. After all, no-one innocent has EVER been arrested, or ever
been executed, have they?
"The best part? I became an ordained minister while not wearing pants." -- CleverNickName
>governments this century is in eight digits.
... I think that estimate is somewhat conservative. I would guess nine digits.
For a quikie rundown...
stalin's purges to socialise the USSR are estimated at 20 mil or so, that's NOT including all of the soviet citizens murdered by rulers other than stalin.
The nazis (hmm, does this invoke Godwin's law?) got 6 million European Jews.
pol pot took out several hundred thousand Cambodians.
Who even knows how many Chinese died in mao's "great leap forward". I've never heard of an accurate number being agreed upon. Most guesstimates I've run across place the number in the tens of millions.
Now, that's ONLY the major players in the genocide game. That does NOT count the numerous wannabes in the "murder your own citizens" competition.
Oh... speaking of which, the examples I've mentioned thus far are only examples of governments murdering their *OWN* citizens. I've not even guessed at the deaths caused when governments have decided that they's just LOVE to annex that land next to their own; trouble being, that it usually belongs to someone else who's willing to fight to keep it.
Add in Germany (damn... did I just do ANOTHER Godwin???) and Japan's little plan to take over the world about sixty years ago, and I think you'll EASILY get into nine digits. To say nothing of the REST of the wars of the 20th century.
So, I'm with the anonymous coward here (damn is THAT a strange occurance). Governments gone rogue are a LOT more of a concern than J. Random Lunatics such as mcveigh, koresh, arafat, et. al.
john
Resistance is NOT futile!!!
Haiku:
I am not a drone.
Remove the collective if
Imagine all the people...
One other thing that came out in the Congressional Hearing that I haven't seen in any postings moderated up to level 3 or above is that Carnivore is an exact equivalent to a practice in the telephony world called "trunk tapping" which Congress specifically debated, deliberated, and outlawed 30 years ago.
When any LEA taps your phone, they've got to go to the particular wire pair that leads to the telephone being tapped. They are not allowed to tap the inter-switch trunk lines, because they could concievably record more than they're legally entitled to under the court-order that authorizes the wiretap. Carnivore's function as a packet sniffer for Ethernet or equivalent allows them to tap the trunks of ISPs - the LAN links between routers, rather than just the xDSL pair leading to your house. This is likely to be ruled illegal.
Longer term, IP Security (encrypting everything in an IP packet except the IP header) is going to reduce LEA's ability to do anything other than traffic analysis (who is talking to whom, but not what they're saying). The quicker we deploy IPsec and use it in daily practice, the sooner we render Carnivore relatively harmless.
Rich
Actually, the recent historical evidence is that in Nazi Germany's case, the government basically acted independently of it's leaders. See Hitler was, by all accounts, rather lazy. He didn't like actually running the country much. So he'd waffle and blab on about things, might mention in passing it would be a good thing for, say, homosexuals to be killed off, or how much he hated the romanies or whatever. And then various people would rush off to try and achieve this in order to get into his good books. The high levels of the Nazi party were basically constantly infighting for bits of delegated authority, and trying to please Hitler. They'd wave the "Fuhrer's Will" line at anyone who argued to get it to happen so they could take the credit. It was never particularly policy to do all those things, it just kind of happened because of the environment in which it took place: the Nazi party was effectively all powerful, Hitler was both head of state and leader of the parliamentary system, so he could basically do anything. That power filtered down and became coloured by each person it passed through, each lower rank trying to appease the next one up. If you think about it rationally, it simply doesn't make sense to kill off a functional 10% of the population. No government would do that as a conscious decision, but in Nazi Germany in the 1930s, there effectively was no conscious decision making happening.
You're being trolled by the ACs. Browse at 1 to avoid them, they don't have the balls to use handles, nor the sense to get moderated up.
Anybody who thinks that Big Brother doesn't care doesn't understand why it's called 'Big Brother'...
"The Internet is made of cats."
I can't deny that the whole thing bothers me in the short term, but every time I think about it I can't help but come to the conclusion that it shouldn't matter what carnivore does.
Fundamentally, people in all parts of the world should be able to do whatever they want with your traffic, and it shouldn't compromise the sender and receiver being able to get what they want. When it comes down to it, something like carnivore shouldn't be any more than an issue between the government and any given ISP that is being coerced into using it.
One of the most amazing things about the net is that it's a completely open system, and at the same time it's reliable. You can send a packet out into the wild and through clever development of end-to-end protocols, have a completely reliable conversation with someone on the other end. The storm in the middle might be dropping half the packets, but the protocols on each end can be designed to detect all this and compensate for it. That's one of the coolest things about the net, IMHO: surviving so well in an archaic system.
If people have to rely on something in the open system (beyond their control) to conform to imposed rules - such as not reading their transmissions - then the people aren't using the net properly. Where one person argues for the right to their privacy, another person can argue for the right to monitor traffic that passes through their system. As soon as rules are imposed on either of these people, it blocks possible directions that the whole thing can expand to in the future.
By trying to block carnivore we're grasping at straws. It's on the same level as security by obscurity: you can make a rule but you can't guarantee that anybody's going to listen to it. No-one foresaw in time that this might happen, and the infrastructure wasn't put in place to ensure we have as much end-to-end privacy as we have end-to-end reliability.
If privacy protocols and encryption don't get standardised and easy to use soon, the net community is going to be more or less crippled, relying on others to turn their back to get privacy. It's security by politeness, and to me that's even dumber than security by obscurity.
===
I heard a piece about this on NPR this morning. I don't remember where to get text, is it available online? Anyway, the FBI was saying that if they opened it up, ppl could learn how to get around it. But can't we do that already? Encryption, etc. Yet another case where obscurity doesn't work -- those who want to can, and those who don't know how are stuck having their privacy invaded, with the result that the ones who they want to snoop on are stopping them...
---
Check this out
Wah!
As if FBI agents don't have anything better to do than read about your plans for next weekend.
Your side lost the war. Perhaps we would all have been better off with a paternalistic Royal government looking after us - but I don't think so.
Those of us who disagree with your approach to things are the intellectual descendants of the people who founded this country. That is why we are fond of quoting people you find obsolete.
These were great men - you Sir are not, and there in lies the difference; your views are common as dirt, their views are profound.
Given the choice of the words of Ben Franklin or those of an Anonymous Coward I choose Franklin.
"my uncle used to paint them"
See, this is my concern about all these conspiracy theories. All these UFOs tucked away in hangers and stuff. That's a lot of people need to know about this stuff.
Helicopters need their engines stripping down and fiddling with every few hundred hours of flying, that's people to fiddle with them. They need painting, that's people to paint them, fuelling, people to fuel them, flying, that's pilots, with log books. They need spare parts, which is orders for parts, which is drivers of trucks to deliver them which is guards on the gates to sign trucks in and out. Which is guards in general on airbases, quite a few of them to make sure no-one gets in, on 8 hour shifts 24 hours a day, every day for years. That's a lot of manpower.
None of these people look up as the things go out?
None of the people nearby own cameras? Take photos in their back gardens? Photograph one, even accidentally? None of them? No news helicopter that racket about cities watching car chases or fires has bothered to point a camera at them?
Governments can't keep secret who their leaders are sleeping with. Black spy helicopters and UFOs have got no chance.
Even if we were to get Carnivore's source under the FOIA (yeah, right), main would probably look something like this:
#include (blacked out text)
int (blacked out)
{
while((blacked out)==(blacked out))
{
int (blacked out) = (blacked out);
(blacked out)();
(blacked out)();
}
and so on...
That's it. I'm no longer part of Team Sanity.
I've posted this before, in a different form. But since people keep on making the same boneheaded statement again and again, I have to keep on presenting myself as an Average Joe exception to the rule.
First, I'm not Joe Schmoe from Asshole, Indiana. I'm from a small town in Iowa, which is probably even more podunk than Asshole, Indiana is. And I'm fairly certain I've been under surveillance at least once in my life, and maybe far more often than that.
Back in 1993 I was just getting interested in crypto, and I had an email exchange with a notorious arms dealer who was under investigation by the U.S. Government for arms smuggling. His name was Phil Zimmerman, the guy who wrote PGP. It was an innocuous email conversation talking about large number theory. But realistically, Phil was under investigation for arms smuggling (specifically, violation of ITAR/EAR), so it seems pretty reasonable for me to believe that he was under some kind of surveillance.
Guess what? Since I was talking to him, that meant I was under surveillance, too.
How many of us here have friends who are active in the phreak community? Go on, raise your hands. How many of you believe that your friends are so 1337 that they'll never be caught, never be fingered to the cops by their friends? Wow. So you have 1337 phreak acquaintances or friends, and you think that they might come under police investigation someday?
Well, guess what, buddy. If they come under investigation... so do you.
Loyd Blankenship, from Steve Jackson Games, found this out the hard way. Remember the Secret Service raid on SJG? That was predicated, in large part, on Blankenship's association with people the government declared to be naughty. It was a pretty tenuous freakin' association, too--and the Secret Service still decided to swoop down and raid the place.
In my last job, I was doing InfoSec for a San Francisco start-up which was going to be expanding into Europe. This concerned me, because a lot of European businesses are partially owned by the government, and the European intelligence agencies (particularly France's DGSE) have been known to eavesdrop on communications for purposes of economic espionage. The NSA does the same thing for American firms--but the NSA claims that it only does so to counteract foreign governmental abuses of their intelligence apparata.
Was I concerned about the DGSE? Hell yes. Little ol' me, the hayseed who grew up on an Iowa farm, was working in an industry where governments commit economic espionage.
A few months ago I became tangentially involved in a criminal investigation. Although I wasn't the target of the criminal investigation, I worked closely with the individual who was under the FBI's spotlight. Guess what? That spotlight got pointed against me, too. Not for long, just long enough for the FBI to realize that I had nothing to do with it. But I didn't like it one bit.
We don't have to be important or criminals to come under the spotlight of government scrutiny. We don't have to be doing anything wrong. We can be community leaders, outstanding citizens and decent human beings--and still, if you associate, knowingly or unknowingly, with people which the government is taking an interest in... well, you can expect to get hit.
Period.
Hell, me, and half the world's script kiddies are probably sniffing you right now! And a doubt a single one of those people are discarding information from anyone else on your subnet either!
Yeah, I'm sure it has to do with the real crap we see somethimes, like goatse.cx, incest stories, spam, etc.., (99.9% AC by the way) that floods by posting 50+ times or more per stories (somethimes really, really long stories) so I guess the mods have less tolerance after a while.
But I gotta say when I found it I really laught, and I tought many would too, so I posted here right away with a litle change in it. I expected either +X funny or -1 OffTopic (Like my own subject line says) but Troll??? I think there is a margin between the two.
But for the windows/microsoft your right about that, but i was laughing to much to think about it ;-)
wiZd0m
Uhh... Freedom of Information Act?! You can request info from the CIA now, and maybe you'll get a letter back from them 10 years from now. There aren't any requirements on a time frame in which they have to resond is there?
kick some CAD
I'm currently involved in implementing software to allow cellular carriers to comply with CALEA.
What the FBI is doing with Carnivore is completely contrary to how surveillance has been done in the past, if the stories about Carnivore are true. From what I understood, the Carnivore system is locked up in some cage, hooked up to the ISP's network and left alone. Only the FBI personnel are allowed to touch it.
The way surveillance has been done in the past is the FBI or any law enforcement agency goes to a carrier with a paper warrant written by a judge that says they can conduct surveillance on a person in a particular geographical area for a certain length of time. The carrier then provisions the wiretap equipment (owned by the carrier) to allow the LEA's Law Enforcement Monitor (LEM) to login and receive surveillance data. The surveillance should stop when the warrant expires if it is not renewed by a judge. The judge does regular reviews of the surveillance to make sure it is all compliant with the law.
With Carnivore, all of the accountability above is missing. The FBI owns and maintains the equipment and can be doing whatever they want with it regardless of whether or not there is a warrant. Who knows if they have implemented the automatic expiration of warrants (we had to in order to be compliant with FCC regulations). At least with the current scheme of things, the carrier has to be presented with a warrant and knows what is being done on its network.
With what I have seen the FBI try to get out of the CALEA law, they are really trying to expand their wiretap capabilities. An example: The FCC's latest CALEA standard allows LEA to continue surveill conference calls that the subject under surveillance has already hung up on or may or may not be a particpant of (in dispatch systems).
I think Carnivore is just another example of the FBI trying to expand its capabilities. I think this is also a case of asking for forgiveness rather than permission. Permissions would have taken too long in their eyes.
Good question. There's something a bit surreal in taking the pro-privacy side against an AC....
/.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
I'd like to know exactly what information the FBI believes it can gain, that cannot be gained through the process of collecting actual evidence. They claim that Carnivore has been used 16 times this year, 10 of those times in matters of "national security." What were these national security issues? I'm sure they'd love for us to believe that they caught 10 big bad terrorists, but I imagine they well all along the lines of reading MafiaBoy's email.
I'm all for stopping terrorism, but how naive do you have to be to believe that the FBI actually means it when they bring up terrorism and kiddy porn? The bottom line is that they want to keep track of every single person that they can, and Carnivore allows them to gather all kinds of nifty information, which they will not ever be held accountable for, since they only need to reveal they've done it if they try to use the information in prosecution.
... of where the hearings are (it mentions a federal courthouse), and I'll go down there right now and report back for this story. I'm in downtown Washington right now. Hurry! VesuviusDC
If we are this concerned with this, why doesn't a sysadmin that has the mysterious black box on his network sniff the data that is passed to and from its master? err, I mean the fbi? i would imagine they did their homework (encryption) but chances are, we can get an idea of how much it communicates with the host. Also, is it illegal to sniff an already illegal device? lol -GG
How do we know if the Carnivore information we receive is valid? If nobody public ever sees the actual code, how do we know what it's doing? Assuming the FBI's greasy thugs slip it past the Fourth Amendment, we need to ensure that every time Carnivore is upgraded, we receive notice. How could a system be set up that ensures the accountability of the program itself? That any version running is the same version we feel Consitutionally secure with?
[RANT]
Law enforcement shouldn't have to do anything like this to nab crooks. It crosses the line of established Constitutional wisdom by a fair degree--outside of drug laws. Who elected all these anti-drug bozos who killed off all our Fourth Amendment rights, anyway??
[/RANT]
Anyway, the point is, I'm curious as to how we can tell when Carnivore code changes, or whether it differs from what we've been told.
No, Carnivore doesn't understand the Constitution or it's amendments. But it does understand that it only applies to people without wealth, power, and influence.
Those with wealth, power, and influence can ignore it. Or run for President.
Will in Seattle
The mere ability of the FBI to snoop POP3/SMTP traffic should not be a suprise. Any punk with a packet sniffer can pull this off.
What should concern us is the scope of Carnivore. Present indications are that it works like a fishing net and we simply trust the FBI to throw out the stuff they're not interested in. In order to be "interested in" traffic, the FBI must have a warrant. Right?
Wrong.
Having a warrant only permits the FBI to introduce the evidence in court. They can still listen in order to determine whether or not to continue an investigation on a suspect. This is a VERY common law enforcement technique. It saves a lot of resources and produces leads that can be followed up later without stepping all over the Fourth Amendment.
Warrantless wiretaps DO happen. Covert audio recordings ARE made. The results are just never introduced in court.
The old rule still applies -- don't say anything in email you wouldn't want your mother, your boss, or the police to hear.
(And yes, black helicopters do exist. My uncle used to paint them.)
-- In the future, everyone will code Perl for 15 minutes. --
Earthlink already established that Carnivore isn't really needed.
Is the joke on us?
Since the USPS is going to give each citizen a free web-based email account (see CNN), then can Carnivore tap that email? And how can you stop it from intercepting USPS email if it reads all of it in the first place?
Will in Seattle
If only Reno read /. she would know the opinions of the important ppl. The ones who actually care about this and are affected by it. But, its not like our opinions matter, we're only the public, we're only a bunch of reject kids that this damn system is target at.
I wonder what the FBI is concerned a review would find?
Anyone using PGP or some other encryption is going to require some horsepower to decrypt. So this means they are looking for the dumber crooks.
So what is it we would find? I can only think of a few reasons:
Paranoia - if they tell us, we will
hack it. (security through
obscurity)
Bad Code - the embarrassment factor when
someone describes a flaw in the
first 10 minutes of its release.
Deception - we find it sniffs for more or
keeps more than we are told
I am not of the group who thinks the FBI is defined by WACO. The issue is that sometimes in the face of a situation that is difficult to understand and even harder to control, you want to look like you can. In the end you jeopardize the very reason for being. To protect our freedoms, even at the risk of some security.
Do you seriously believe that the federal government of the United States doesn't break the law? For the first time I'm posting as an AC only because I'd rather not lose my job over what I'm about to say.
I've work for the Department of Defense for quite a few years now (CENAN-CO) and we often have broken the law. Part of my job has included supervision of construction projects done by private contractors. Regularly we would monitor phone calls, use hidden microphones and cameras (often placed in the contractor's own trailer/office), and occasionally we would even intercept mail, faxes, and electronic communications (yes, email).
Why did we do this? I wish I had an easy answer, but I don't. National security has never been a real concern. Quite often we did it to "double check" on a contractor's bid, or just because we could do it. And did the contractor ever know? Of course not.
Just thought you'd like to know. You're not really paranoid if they really are watching you.
Really, what's the big bitching deal at the
FBI? The ISP can track user's email in 2
seconds.. Watch this..
for SUSPECT in `cat
echo "/var/spool/mail/fbi" >> ~$(SUSPECT)/.qmail
done
Why do they want to put a box at the ISP?
-- The Funk, The Whole Funk, And Nothing But The Funk
Look, while I understand that people don't like the idea of having the government read their e-mail, I think that a lot of people frankly overestimate their importance in the grand scheme of things. There are millions upon millions of people in this country. And yet some little schmoe from Asshole, Indiana thinks that he is so important that the "gummint" has got dozens of agents watching his every move and reading every little piece of mail that he gets.
Puh-leeeeeeze. Unless the FBI all of a sudden raises its number of employees by a factor of ten thousand or so, surveillance on every American citizen is not possible. Even if it were, why would the government bother? They've got better things to do than watch you defile yourself in front of electronic porn. Somebody here on Slashdot has got a sig that says "Big Brother doesn't care about you." That's right. Don't be so deluded and self-important as to believe that people actually care about what you're doing.
Personally, I think that the only people that need to be monitored are those who are worried about the government monitoring them. By expressing worries, they've expressed that they are probably doing something illegal or extralegal. This is why I am (more or less) in favor of Carnivore. It's not the end of privacy in America by a long shot. People who believe that it is are probably conspiracy theorists who should go back to figuring out who shot JFK (hint: his initials were LHO.)
"Please use email for all of your future correspondence with our Congressional overseers- it makes, er, participating in politics that much easier for you. Yeah."
making an analogy between a phone conversation and e-mail. I would guess that the main problem is that there is not any current legislation dealing specifically with e-mail, just a vague feeling some people have that e-mail privacy is protected under the 4th amendment.
Moller
What good would Carnivore do in catching any but the stupidest of criminals anyway? That is to say, if a criminal enterprise were to use strong encryption on their e-mail, wouldn't that secure the e-mail from being read by Carnivore? Given the fact that e-mail can persist for years on every mail server between the sender and receiver, only an idiot would send anything confidential and/or possibly incriminating over unsecured e-mail. It would seem to me that catching anyone this stupid would be easily enough done without Carnivore.
I am of course opposed to terrorism. (For the record, I am also opposed the killing of men and hermaphrodites by terrorists, which you apparently are not.) It is the nature of a free society to allow people to break its laws. It is the duty of a just society to identify and punish those people. It is a messy system, and it may be pretty dysfunctional, but it's the best we've got.
Sometimes, people break the law in horrifying ways. *Those people* should be punished, in a way that does not infringe on the rights of the rest of us. The only thing more frightening to me than living in a country in which things like OKC can happen would be living in a country that has so little freedom that things like OKC can't happen. Such a country would be no better than a prison with 250 million cells, or for that matter, no better than Stalinist Russia.
you mean people actually follow the link to my page? cool...:-)
now i guess that means I should put more pictures up!
Moller
This is really a non-item, since we all have a pretty good idea of how Carnivore works. It is probably very simple, just scanning for certain headers that will trigger it and then turn on the collection mechnism to collect that email and file it away.
If it does anything more than that, I really doubt they would admit it. Do you really think they are going to say,
"Yeah, we set it up to scan for words like Bomb and President, and then we take names, put them in a secret database, and monitor everything that person does." ?
While this is slightly relevant, it isn't a big thing. Maybe a story covering their response to the FOIA request would be better, but like I said above, don't expect much.
-----------------------------
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Maybe we should have the FBI come in and compile all the software we need and then install it on various ISPs on a case-by-case basis. In the meantime, the e-mail ordering the obliteration of your daughter's elementary school or your grandmother's nursing home has already been sent and has gone out to the co-conspirators undetected.
No, for the system to be effective, it has to be available at a moment's notice. The paranoid rantings of those who feel that the government is "coming after them" are not impressive in the least.
Well, the FBI does not feel it necessary to place a black box on every phone line in the US because they might have a need to wire tap them. Instead, they go to the phone companies, and the phone companies facilitate the action. There is no reason that they could not require ISPs to provide them with email from specific court order named accounts - and that such accounts be "tappable" on a moment's notice by the ISP.
The precedent the FBI would set here is unmistakable. They claim they have a right, in the name of national security, to become an integral part of email traffic. The government NEVER has a right to become an integral part of its citizen's private communications without reasonable cause!!!
That is a blatant violation of the 4th Amendment.
Not to mention it is just a stupid idea. Carnivore is conceptualized as a mail server intercept -
not a mail server sniffer. Its failure will shut down ISPs.
who cares. use some other arena to advertise your garbage. use the dumpster next time please.
Yankees suck. yep you know it.