Slashdot Mirror
Privacy Invasion By Any Other Name
Steve writes: "CNET News.com reports that the FBI has changed the name of Carnivore to DCS1000. The DCS stands for 'Digital Collection System.' According to the article, 'A spokesman for the FBI denied that the name change stemmed from worries that the name Carnivore made the system sound like a predatory device made to invade people's privacy. But the Illinois Institute of Technology, which last fall issued an analysis of the system at the request of the Justice Department, recommended that the name be changed for just that reason, according to an IIT analyst.'
The article does not say which of the IITRI recommendations were incorporated other than the name change." The FDA requires prominent, nominally truthful labels on food, but apparently not all TLA agencies feel quite the same way. I thought "Carnivore" was a beautiful flash of truth in labelling, so this move is a shame.
"It has come to our attention that the name Carnivore made the DCS1000 system sound like a predatory device made to invade people's privacy. In actuality, the DCS1000 is an electronic device made to invade people's privacy. We regret any confusion."
Kinda like how taxes became "contributions" (at the barrel of a gun...) and spending (pissing away those "contributions") became "investments" in the previous Administration.
It'll be interesting to see what the new folks do about Carnivore once they've settled in.
just b/c the name changes does not mean that the public is going to accept this crap any more than it would have before.
.02
I really don't like what the government is doing these days. We originally seperated from an overpowering system to form our own where little intervention was seen at the national level. Now look what we have...
It is a shame that our government believes that they need this sort of power to control us! We talk about how horrible China is? At least they have proxies to allow them access to the "civilized" world.
Just my worthless
hey, they did have an article posted about "Deja" I wonder if this would fall under that category ;-)
Oooh! Now that makes me feel so much more, um, private.
Note to FBI: Naming the damned thing so it sounds like the latest model of dishwasher doesn't mean that the privacy advocates are going to calm down. (As Bugs Bunny might have said: What a bunch of maroons!)
--
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
Somewhere, there must be a geek with some source code secreted on some media or another--I find it hard to believe that no one swiped a copy, or conveniently forgot to erase a copy he installed at home for debugging. Somewhere, somehow, it'll show up.
Of course, how could I have been so blind. The FBI used 19-year-old wAr3z d00dz to write Carnivore!
The boss came by one day. "Oh, boys. By the way. This is important, secret stuff, so don't take a copy or anything. Oh, is that a cupholder?"
----
lake effect weblog
{Network engineer in Chicago--looking for work!}
Wasn't that a Robert Duvall movie?
Devious Carnivore Substitute (the program with 1000 faces)
---
McCarthy's Communist witch hunt -> HUAC1953 (House Un-American Activities Commitee investigation)
---
Don't be a fucking condescending idiot. Historically speaking, many of the greatest and most respectable coders have inserted backdoors for themselves in sensitive places, hidden "signatures" of some sort in their source code, and yes, kept copies of sensitive software for themselves. Hell, it doesn't even take a coder to ignore security--recall recent press over former FBI directors, Los Alamos nuclear lab techs, and other, bringing classified work home with them on unsecured media? So in conclusion, fuck you, condescending assmaster. Use common sense.
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."--Tacitus, *The Annals*
Man, what a pain for the FBI, especially after they just got done changing it to Carnivore from the earlier name, "Net Raper 2000".
CNET News.com reports that the FBI has changed the name of to DCS1000. The DCS stands for 'Digital Carnivore System.'
So understandably, I am nervous about any Government or business collection of data above and beyond the minimum needed. Some people never have enough.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
If you're going to have a beef with the ATF, you should at least realize that they're not part of the FBI--they're Treasury, not Justice, agents.
And, of course, they had nothing to do with Elian Gonzalez, who was removed by the INS (also a DOJ entity).
No relation to Happy Monkey
This isn't one of those 'Why is slashdot posting this blah blah blah' posts. IMO this is important in case anyone hasn't heard about the name change already.
Seriously though, gov't obfuscation of a questionable project? Please don't act surprised.
"Me Ted"
BOSTON SUCKS!
I am so relieved that they changed the name. It was a little disturbing that the government had this program called Carnivore that they could use to violate people's privacy online. I feel a lot better now... If I'm going to have my privacy violated I'd much rather the program be called DCS 1000 than Carnivore! After all, it really did sound like some mean nasty program... But with the new name... wow! They do care! It warms my heart.
I agree with the notion that Carnivore is not inherently evil, yes. Obviously, law enforcement must have the ability to perform surveillance on criminals, or people suspected of being criminal for good cause. The problem with Carnivore stems from the method in which this capacity has been implemented.
If the FBI were an entire agency made up of "RoboCop" clones, law-abiding super-ethical droids with a fanatical love of the notion that justice is blind and a good streak that makes a girl scout look like Dr. Mengele, then ok. I'd be fine with Carnivore, as it exists. But they are not. The FBI has a challenging and frustrating job, and they are human. So, from time to time, they cheat. COINTELPRO is an excellent example, one that probably predates most of the readers of Slashdot, where the FBI tagged every organization that was even remotely at odds with the current government as "subversive," and tapped/bugged/surveilled its members. The short version is that all sorts of bad naughty things happened.
Law enforcement have been known to listen in on a tap before the warrant came in authorizing them to start doing so. This, from a good person who had nonetheless admitted to doing it himself, and also admitted that such a practice is common. And yes, the taps are often put in place as soon as the REQUEST for the warrant is put in...the warrant doesn't really authorize the tap, it authorizes listening to it. Why do that? Because you can still get information that can help you, even if you must hide the fact that you had inside information in the first place. Still, the FBI does not have taps already wired into every phone line, set to easily record and collate our lives.
Carnivore, on the other hand, is a system with taps in place for everyone who sends data across the links in the USA. Carnivore does not have user-level access logging...well, it does, except that there are only a few user accounts for the entire system, so it's not logging actual users. This, of course, means there is no accountability. Furthermore, the fashion in which the FBI has handled this entire affair is frightening. Fighting, kicking and screaming into an independent review process, only to choose "independents" who are beholden to them. Refusal to disclose details of the systems...and don't try to tell me that disclosure would weaken Carnivore in some manner unless you can figure out how to easily evade tcpdump running on an unknown box somewhere (also unknown) between you and another end point. Evasion of Carnivore would be made even harder by the QoS platform (Packeteer) that is integrated into the DragonWare (aka Carnivore) suite.
One of the greatest complaints of our founding fathers was the abuses committed by governmental authorities. Our system of government has, integrated into it, safety checks against such things, out of recognition that law enforcement officers are as human, corruptible, and fallible as any of us. Here we have a situation where those checks do not carry far enough down into the day-to-day activities of the largest and most powerful law enforcement apparatus in our country.
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
According to the article, 'A spokesman for the FBI denied that the name change stemmed from worries that the name Carnivore made the system sound like a predatory device made to invade people's privacy.
Wake up America and realize how much you have to lose. People willing to give up freedom in exchange for security deserve neither, and neither you will get.
The government derives its power from the people. And right now the vast majority of people are too apathetic to care about something as 'trivial' as their own privacy.
But then, I'm just preaching to the choir.
Only on slashdot can a posting be rated "Score -1, Insightful".
What the botched ATM phone tap can't do - and which Car^H^H^HBarney^H^H^H^H^H^HDCS-1000 can - is log all the traffic for future analysis.
If you "botch" the ATM switch tap, you still need humans to go through the data you illegally gathered. If you "botch" the filter parameters with DCS-1000, you just file the disk away for long-term storage.
>I personally think that everyone (not just the FBI) should have the power to tap any communication line at any time.
Actually, that's not as laughable as it seems. While I'd prefer "no tapping", a world in which "everyone could tap" would at least be a level playing field. Sure, the marketroids could snoop on you, but you could snoop right back and publish lists of the offending IPs.
As currently configured (120M removable storage), DCS-1000 isn't a major threat. Swap that 120M removable storage for a 60G IDE drive, and you've got something much more interesting.
How long before a copy of Carnivore leaks and gets mirrored for public consumption? I mean, presumably it has not only been used by several FBI agents, it also had to be coded. Somewhere, there must be a geek with some source code secreted on some media or another--I find it hard to believe that no one swiped a copy, or conveniently forgot to erase a copy he installed at home for debugging. Somewhere, somehow, it'll show up. The only question is when.
/. a while back, and got a lot of press about a year ago, but I can't find the link to the software publisher's site any more). Where are good leaks and whistleblowers when you need them.
Of course, I've wondered the same about other LEA and TLA net spying tools. All the other LEA used stuff, such as mirroring utils like Encase, are readily available if you know where to look. But I have yet to see any of the cool stuff, like Carnivore and the software that's being sold to police departments for remote computer break-ins (was mentioned on
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."--Tacitus, *The Annals*
Depending on where you go in the country a hogie is a grinder is a submarine. But it is all still lunch!(A very good lunch too - ham and Swiss- sooo goood!) Just because the name changes doesnt mean the actual substance changes.
Just because you change somthing's name doesn't mean you change the thing. If I copy a file and rename it, what really changes? It still has all the same information but a few couple of bits say B and not A.
The FBI is still gonna use Carnivore/DCS1000 for the same purposes(hopefully all legal) but in the end, the system is still the same. Do they think that the public is that stupid that changing its name to an acronym will make people forget that it exists? I hope not!
-Life is a Journey, --Not a Guided Tour! ---Trust me, I've already looked for the guide book.
Just a bit of clarification on this, I go to the Illinois Institute of Technology, Carnivore was reviewed by IITRI (IIT Research Institute) a wierd building that has more government and big business tie-ins than you could shake a stick at. IITRI is not IIT. The two are seperate entities, IITRI is just affiliated with IIT and is based on the IIT campus, on the south side of Chicago, a block away from where I now sit.
you were scooped by yourself :)2 7&mode=thread
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/02/09/22432
Someone should have had this idea before:
and of course...
Je t'aime Stéphanie
He told me all about the hoops agents must leap through to get a wiretap, and how limited it was once obtained. For example, on a phone tap, as soon as it becomes clear a conversation is NOT about the crime being investigated, the agent must turn off the sound and stop taping. He can then periodically spot-check the conversation to see if it is related to the investigation.
He also told me how hard it was to get decent technical people to work for the FBI, especially since as non-manager, non-gun-carrying agents, technical people tend to be second tier employees. He seemed to think that things like Carnivore offered the only way to counteract the advantage suspects could get by using the internet and computers. As if to prove his own point about technical naivete, he seem puzzled when I asked why the FBI couldn't just subpoena email as needed from ISPs. This would seem analogous to a wiretap, which presumably requires cooperation from the phone company.
I suspect many of the rank and file law enforcement support things like Carnivore just because it makes their job easier. They know they would not abuse the system. And if they did bend the rules a bit, it would be only to catch someone who was really, really bad....
"Rub her feet." -- L.L.
FBI Agent Dave: tweaking in the back of DCS1000 with a soldering iron
DCS1000: Daisy, daisy, give me your email, do . . .
Here's a snippet from a recent chat on AOL's Br1ttn3y Sp34rz chat room.
This translates into:
You've got to love the FBI. I really wish them well.