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

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?