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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."
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?
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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...
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.
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I don't really mind double posts on
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.
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
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.
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.
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.)
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...
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.
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.
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
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...
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
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...
---
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.
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.
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.
My guess is that you're probably correct that Carnivore isn't some nefarious conspiracy on the part of the FBI. However, having worked in large bureaucracies, I think you're wrong that the dealy is just red tape. The first instinct of a bureaucrat is to stonewall any request for information. Disclosure never is to their advantage. At best, there's no harmful stuff there, but the organization/bureaucrat isn't going to get any brownie points for doing the right thing by releasing it. At worst, there's going to be something horrible that will embarrass the organization. get them a hearing on capitol hill, and possibly ruin the bureaucrat's career. The the first question that runs thru a bureaucrat's mind when getting a request like this is: "What's in this stuff they're requesting? Do they know something? I'd better have our staff review it before releasing so maybe we can bury it or at least get our story straight about it."
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. --
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."