IIT's Carnivore Review "A Sham"?

plastickiwi writes: "According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, U.S. House of Representatives majority leader Dick Armey is on the warpath about the Illinois Institute of Technology's nascent review-in-progress of the U.S. government's Carnivore technology. Find the article on their site. 'It's a bad idea to have people with clear political ties reviewing a system under political scrutiny,' said a spokesman for Armey. In a prepared statement Armey referred to the review as 'a whitewash.' Ouch."

Comments

Requiring Virgins...

[trims]

(ok, the title is probably going to get me marked as a "troll", but I think it's really relevant...)

I'm worried about the level of "purity" we seem to be demanding of anyone these days, in all sorts of situations. The reason I titled this post "Requiring Virgins" is that it almost seems as though we insist on a level of untouchability that no one can reasonably meet. That is, we're back to the "if your daughter's not a virgin on her wedding night, well, she's a slut and obviously not marriagable." It used to be (back in the old, old, days) that if you discovered your wife had actually slept with another man before you married her, it was grounds for instant divorce (and pretty much complete social ostrication); never mind that men slept with anything with 2 tits and a hole (pardon my French).

Two recent examples here on /. : Judge Reinquist's son and the Dean in this story. There may be lots of reasons why IIT is not a good choice for the review, but complaining that someone who isn't doing the review, nor is directly involved in the review in any way once had ties to the DOJ 13 years ago is ludicrous. Likewise, the whole thing about Reinquist and his son (who's so peripherally tied to the MS cases it's silly) is muckraking.

This usually comes up in political cases, where random associates or old-and-forgotten acts are used to tar-and-feather someone unreasonably. But I'm seeing this in lots of other aspects, too. We seems to be expecting that anyone involved in anything we care about has a level of untouchability that only cartoon characters can have. People, if you don't have a "Conflict of Interest", you're not qualified to do it. By this I mean that you can't possibly work in a field without having some ties to something that theoretically might be a "Conflict of Interest". We seem to have lost all reason in judging these things.

I'm tired of living in a society where people seemt to think that the only way to "trust" someone is to have everyone live in a glass house under a microscope all the time. And it's not just corporations and gov't invading our privacy. It's you and me, too, everytime we cry to see something we have no business looking at (fundamentally, why the outcry every time political candidate refuses (or hell, is even late) releasing their tax returns? That's fucking private, and isn't germane to the issue!)

Full disclosure is one thing. However, full disclosure with an anal probe, and being disqualified because you have a pimple on your ass is another. I'm tired of this crap.

-Erik

Well, Duh...

[InfinityWpi]

Didn't we read that the entire review team seems to have top-secret level clearance? That some are ex-DoD people? That not a single one of them is a legitimate researcher or scientist without government ties?

You know what we need to do? Get a team of students. Not even graduates, undergrads. A pair of EE majors, and a half-dozen CS majors. Give them the device. Come back a month later, they'll be able to tell you what it does, how it does it, and how you can use it to screw iwth other people's stuff.

This is a political complaint, not a REAL complain

[MemRaven]

The problem here is that while Armey is actually complaining against the Carnivore review, he's not doing it for the right reasons (okay, ANY reason to oppose it is right IMHO, but this one is less right).

Let's consider some of the things he did say:

• Members of the team have political ties.
• Names weren't removed correctly.

That's all well and good, but let's look at the laundry list of problems he didn't mention:

• The premise of Carnivore is a violation of civil liberties just by its existance.
• Most of the people involved aren't engineers, they're politicos (just academic politicos).
• Allowing the authors to choose the reviewers AT ALL won't ever work if you want unbiased reviews.
• Keeping the process secret simply encourages people to come up with conspiracy theories which will never EVER be dispelled.
• That just doing things like winnowing and chafing will remove any ability for Carnivore to do its job.

Ordinarily, I'm not one to look a gift horse in the mouth. But considering some of the things that Dick Armey's mouth has spouted (the Barney Frank incident comes to mind immediately), I'm not willing to take this as a victory.

We want to win this by fighting on the right issues, not turning it into a political football. The moment it becomes a purely partisan battle, the larger issue is ignored and lost to all of us.

Armey's hidden agenda

[mwalker]

Armey's just worried someone is going to put Carnivore on an ISP link and block everything that contains the word "Dick".

Re:You sir, are insane

[B'Trey]

Dude, I'm seriously _not_ willing to put something like Carnivore into the hands of people who are just a step above 5KR1P7 K1DD135.

Uh, dude, just what do you think Carnivore IS? It's basically a glorified packet sniffer. There are tools already out there that do everything it does and more that the kiddies play with on a daily basis. The sticky point is that the kiddies and crackers have to try to sneak access undetected while the government can force ISPs to install it on their systems. The review isn't about the technical side of how it works - it's about what controls and limits (or lack thereof) are built into it. How do we know that they're only looking at Joe Crack-dealer's email and not at Wally Politically-incorrect's email as well?