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What is Carnivore, and How Does it Work?
MainFrame writes "A friend of a friend of mine, Tom Perrine, was "invited" to testify at the Congressional subcommittee meeting concerning Carnivore. "I had seen Carnivore on a recent trip to Quantico and had the opportunity to discuss the program with some of the developers. This was all before the Earthlink flap. I hope that my (written) testimony was balanced and fair. Those of you who know me, know that I try to balance my firm belief in personal privacy and Constitutional rights with my belief that there *are* times when law enforcement has legitimate needs and a duty to access electronic communications, when properly authorized by a court. " There's a lot of confusion about what carnivore is and what it does, so its nice to see something like this which appears to be much more informed.
When it is MUCH simpler to encrpyt your eMail than it is to secure your phone communications - why not just HIDE anything you don't want the FBI to see?
M$: "We're #2!"
Funny, all they found was a copy of Windows 95 with a copy of Back Orifice running....
Kalrand
-the voice of reason
Kalrand
-the voice of reason
In college I spent 400$ on an old Mac and DLed a demo copy of etherpeek. I then wrote some filters and had a packet sniffer that could do the exact same things that it sounds like carnivore does. Maybe not with as pretty of an interface but it is still just a packet sniffer nothing more nothing less. For under a grand anyone can do this. I would bet our lovely tax dollars pay 50k or so for each one of these PCs. Gotta love government bloat. AS for privacy from it, like I said anyone including them with a network port and 1k can monitor packets. I prefer to encrypt anything special. Wonders if someone will sniff this since it is from work. Oh well
I am 31337 or something.
As this stated in this MSNBC article, Carnivore is just a good idea and system with a bad name.
br"The need for a system such as Carnivore may be regrettable, but it is a necessary evil. And, just like a police search of your home or a wiretap of your phone, the FBI can use its Carnivore system only with a judge's permission." I dunno, it's a trade-off: personal safety for personal liberties. Everything has it's price, including safety.
Help me through college please!
Pardon me for going against the tide of slashdot opinions, but I still don't understand what has everyone so riled up. Perhaps I should blame the FBI for choosing a menacing sounding name like "Carnivore," but certainly their intentions are not to destroy or harm. The FBI is a very major government organization paid for by our tax dollars. I may not agree with their moves all the time, but I trust that they are only concerned about the best interest of our country. Why would they go out of their way to harm the very citizens who keep them running?
Government monitoring is nothing new. The FBI have long had many wiretapping systems set up to catch criminals. The USPS scans threatening mail trying to prevent people from mailing bombs and traps to their enemies. Cameras are installed along many city streets to watch crimes and catch traffic violations. I don't understand why these survelaince methods aren't coming under fire as well... why is the internet so incredibly different?
Besides, look at the results of these efforts. Many major crimelords and killers have been caught by slipping up in the presence of wiretapping. Mail monitoring has prevented possible serial terrorists from doing something like send mail bombs. And street cameras catch amazing ammounts of crime, from murders to robberies to prostitution to speeding. I expect Carnivore to be extremely helpful in capturing pedophiles, pirates, terrorists, and other criminals.
Yes, I may be concerned about my own e-mail being read. But I know that I am a law abiding citizen, my messages to people are trivial to the FBI, and that I feel like I need to hide nothing. And even if you *need* privacy, what about encryption? PGP is extremely hard to crack from my knowledge. Use that. I know the Slashdot mentality may contradict it, but it's unrealistic to expect the internet to remain unregulated forever. Regardless, some form of government restricition and monitoring will come eventually, and having read a little about Carnivore, I am satisfied with their efforts.
Emerson Willowick: Thinker, Writer, Human Being.
Open source? Great. How do I know that's the source code the FBI actually used in the live unit? Not possible.
Technical docs? Spiffy. Same question.
Only with a warrant? Yeah, like I trust them to stick to that limitation. (Not to mention the fact that warrants can be issued very quietly, at three in the morning, by a "rubber-stamp" judge, and with ridiculously broad criteria.)
And don't even get me started on the potential of the unit being cracked. Win2K? What were they smoking?
I'll repost this from the previous Carnivore article. This post was way at the bottom, and thus was completely ignored by the moderators. I am its original author. It deals with the fact that even though your message text is encrypted, the FBI can still read the headers, and find out who is contacting who. This issue was brought up by another anonymous coward, to which I replied:
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You've hit the problem right on the nail, my friend. Visit www.crimelink.com for an example of this program you are talking about. Organizational matrices and all that stuff are very key to finding out who is doing what, and what the odds are that what they are doing is illegal.
For example. You email Joe Blow regarding a post you saw on a forum about gardening. Little did you know that Joe Blow had earlier emailed someone else, whose email he got off a forsale newsgroup advertising hydroponics. Turns out the guy selling the hydroponics was suspected of selling drugs, because his hydro bill was high enough to set off a flag. Now Joe Blow is just a gardener, but he was dealing with a drug dealer, and now YOU are dealing with someone who has delt with a drug dealer. You automatically have a "relationship" with a drug dealer based on an indirect contact. Carnivor can easily be used to setup such relationships, and programs like Crimelink can easily be used to give graphs and charts outlining any possible relationships.This means police and related agencies can establish a Whose-who in their ISPs neighbourhood.
Now, I don't believe this sort of thing to be happening to the extent that others might believe (IE Echelon voice regognition crazyness and etc) however the potential is very real, and limited capabilities DO EXIST right now. With the onset of such systems as Carnivore, these capabilities grow exponentially towards the situations similiar to that I've outlined above. What I fear the most though is that by next week, Slashdot et al will have forgotten this and moved on to the newest "tiny computer" or Linux IPO news.
Signed,
Your Anonymous (?) Coward.
While I agree that the government needs to be able to monitor suspected criminals(with a warrant of course), I'm not sure that arbitrary filtering criteria is the way to go. What would they use? Keyword searches? TCP/IP headers? What's to prevent the FBI from picking up whole usenet threads or the actions of people reading Slashdot? If I post a response to Joe Child Molester on Slashdot will I come under FBI scrutiny just for mentioning his name? What about the people who quote my(and his) message? Admittedly, these are public forums, but it seems like a huge waste of time to have to scan through all of the fluff that will inevitably be produced. And heaven forbid there should be another person on the ISP with the same name.
Why not just snoop at the (modem/DSLAM/etc) server? If packet sniffing were more like a literal wiretap, I would be a lot more comfortable and I'm sure the FBI would be able to get a lot more work done. It shouldn't be that hard to get only one user's packets.
Visit the
I quote:
"And the truly amazing part of this story is that there is nothing illegal about the data gathering, itself. Since the kiosk doesn't belong to you or me, we are bound by terms of usage that allow the kiosk provider to do pretty much whatever they want with the bits we run through their system. By simply using their machine, we give up our privacy without even knowing it."
It sounds like we need some privacy laws to fill the lupole that Carnivore seeks to exploit. I, for one, favor the british aproach to seeking the informed consent of the people providing the data before collecting it.
I like privacy as much as the next guy, so here's my two cents. I know that sometimes the govt. has to spy on people, but WHY DO IT AT THE ISP LEVEL WHERE YOU CAN SPY ON EVERYONE? I don't need my mail being 'accidentally' sniffed. If they want to watch criminals, put wiretaps AT the criminal's connection at his house NOT ON EVERYONE ELSE'S CONNECTION. 2 words: duh.
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a funny comment: 1 karma
an insightful comment: 1 karma
a good old-fashioned flame: priceless
this sig limit is too small to put anything good h
However, notice that a Carnivore can be altered through its modem. A good guy, a bad good guy, or an intruder can alter the configuration remotely. I hope the security on that modem is as good as it should be.
Chairman:
Yes, Mr. Perrine we appreciate your views on this subject. However, you have not answered my original question.
Do you know the location of agent Mulder?!
I think sendmail should be updated to by default use encryption/SSL to connect to other servers. Sure, most other servers will refuse the SSL connection, and then sendmail could fall back to unencrypted transport. But, if it used encryption by default, as such a popular mail package, certainly more and more e-mails would begin to be transmitted with encryption. Other mail server vendors would likely follow the lead after it became commonplace.
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I am the dot in slashdot.org
Additionally, with the source available it could be:
- ported to a more secure operating system.
- examined for flaws.
- easily patched if any security bugs are detected.
- fixed if it has a bug that interferes with an ISP's systems.
And with the configuration done by the ISP the ISP can look out for its subscribers' interests by refusing to tap anyone without the presentation of the appropriate court order. The FBI has a poor track record in that regard.
ISP configuration of software on an ISP-constructed platform (in an ISP-supplied locked cage locked cage) using ISP-tweaked software has no more problems for evidence custody tracking than the ISP-provided signals to an FBI-operated box. (Especially one that is remotely accessable and reconfigurable.) The ISP might have to provide an expert witness to describe their tweaks. But the evidentiary issues are mainly that the evidence isn't forged or altered, not that the sampling filter is incorrect.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
"The FBI will always have to live with the legacy of the Hoover era, just as the Congress will have to constantly compare itself with the McCarthy hearings, and the Executive Branch must always remember Watergate. These and other incidents from our country's history have contributed to an unfortunate general distrust of our public institutions when they concern themselves with the rights of our citizens."
All it takes is one power hungry nutball to go after anyone they consider "devient" and you're being tracked by your "warm and friendly" FBI for being a member of the NRA, watching Rosie, or enjoying a cuban cigar.
History is prolog.
In India, where I live - a relatively free, democratic country all ISPs are expected to provide (at their expense) monitoring equipment for the government. The same goes for Cellular Telephone providers. There has not been a single peep of protest here.
In most countries, including the UK and the rest of the EU, there is not as much concern for individual freedom as there is in the US.In Singapore, for example, when Internet access was first provided, it was through proxy servers so that the government could censor the 'net. This is still true of countries like Saudi Arabia.
I am quite sure that the FBI will never be allowed to attempt the kind of monitoring that is probably going on right now around the world.
If you live in the United States -- count your blessings!
"Rowe's Rule: The odds are five to six that the light at the end of the tunnel is the headlight of an oncoming train."
Government monitoring is nothing new. Hitler's Gestapo did it, Pol Pot's gangs did it, and Mao's whatever, and Stalin's GRU, and Nixon's burglers, and Clinton's FBI, and each of these organizations believed that they were doing the right thing. Sometimes, all of them were doing things we'd approve of. Usually they were not.
Your messages may well seem trivial to the FBI. Every government uses trivial people to make examples of, to keep the rest in line. You're as good as any to persecute for some trivial act which our government has chosen to demonize. Do you smoke pot? Do you tell people we should leave pot smokers alone, even though they smell bad? Have you ever carried cash across town pay for a used cars? Harmless people who represented no threat to society have been persecuted for these activities, recently, in the US.
Law enforcement organizations indoctrinate their (usually stupid) employees with the mindset that there are three sorts of people: cops, suspects and convicts. If they haven't found a way to frame you yet, they should try harder. The US Fish and Wildlife cops are usually NOT considered to be corrupt or politicised. A friend of mine was cook on one of their enforcement boats in the gulf of Alaska. He was shocked to find that the two topics of conversation (other than cheating on their wives) were "how we framed so-and-so" and "how we'll plant evidence on this next guy we want to get". He quit after one trip; the cops were too disgusting to live around, morally at least.
One last point: did mail monitoring really stop the unibomber? I thought it was the fact that some newspaper published one of his diatribes, which was recognized by a brother.
In conclusion, I believe that law enforcement is vitally important. Allowing them to work in secret only helps them to become worse than the people they are supposed to protect us from: worse in the same way that the mafia is worse than a bunch of disorganized crooks. Corrupt government is the worst possible threat to law abiding citizens, and secrecy breeds corruption, just as does power.
Nels
See what I've been reading.
No, it's a great name doing exactly what it should be doing. Carnivore, when operating correctly, records only emails relevant to a court ordered case. It was used (not counting cases involving large ISPs which provide the logging themselves, *cough*AOL*Cough*) in somewhere between 25 and 100 cases in just 1999.
/sure/ has gotten totally replaced!) sucked in 6 gigs of data an hour. For comparison, James Joyce's Ulysses is 1.6megs. so, 3840 copies of Ulysses an hour.
= 1 ; Calculation (6gig*(1024meg/gig)) * (1 book/1.6meg)) )
Omnivore, an 'earlier version' (which I'm
( http://www.msnbc.com/news/431355.asp?0nm=B16M&cp1
Hear anything about Omnivore recently?
Right. So, the Carnivore name is perfect.
The real question is when are they gonna product an OpenBSD/Trusted Extensions or a Linux version? I mean, it's running on Windows. I don't want to trust the FBI with the power to monitor all my email, much less every skript kiddie in the world.
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
Or they could have named it Herbivore, saying it gets to the root of the problem.
Tip: the Digital Telephony Act has been around for years mandating built-in wiretaps in phone switches, but Speak Freely is free, includes source, and provides your choice of strong encryption methods.
-- Could you use my software consulting serv