Carnivore In Living Color

joel jaeggli writes: "The Carnivore talk done by Marcus Thomas from the FBI at NANOG 20 is now online... you can retrieve it from: University of Oregon Videolab. This talk was meant for a technical audience, and the discussion and questions from the audience are very enlightening. Major thanks should go to the folks from Merit/NANOG for managing to schedule this talk, to Marcus Thomas and the FBI for their candor, and the NANOG crowd for asking the important questions."

Comments

Re:Carnivore, et al., can be beaten.

[Yardley]

The FBI is putting a black box between you and the Internet via your ISP. What this means is that your communication passes through this box. The FBI is now the Gatekeeper for whether or not your communication gets out and whether others communication (including the whole wealth of information from the Internet) gets to you. They know what you are looking at, what you download, who you email, chat with, or talk to. They know everything that you do on the Internet. And now the FBI also gets to decide if it wants you to have a connection at all.

Yes, people will say, no, that's not what the FBI is doing. They're just putting a black box in at every U.S. ISP so that they can monitor certain people's communications only after receiving a judges signature (by the way, in California the DEA has a deal under the law which allows them to no longer get a courts permission when phone tapping people accused of dealing drugs -- they can sign the warrants themselves). The FBI says they will use this technology sparingly. They say it's for our own good.

Do we really need our Internet communications being monitored? I think not.

I for one do not want a technology in place (at my taxpayer expense) which allows the government the ability to shut down the entire Internet at a moments thought.

--