Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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 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.
------------
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
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.
---
I am the dot in slashdot.org
Or they could have named it Herbivore, saying it gets to the root of the problem.