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Cheaper Carnivore Alternatives Still Want To Spy On You
Troodon writes: The Register reports on Forensics Explorers' NetWitness.
Rather than relying upon the FBI's 'fail-safe' separation of Carnivore Operators and Case Agents to discriminate between legitimate data and that inadmissably, incidentally siphoned up along with it and submitting to the installation of a mysterious black box within their network, ISP's can comply with CALEA in-house for approximately $2,500 per collector and between $35,000 and $45,000 for an analysis station. Should you fancy a little development, another cheaper alternative exists: Altivore." Not sure any of this is much comfort -- the lesser of two evils is still evil.
Speaking of spies... ASIO is to get the power to compell those it chooses to interrogate to answer its questions... multi-year jail-terms for those who decline to answer the questions...
"Einstein argued that [...] God is not capricious or arbitrary. No such faith comforts the software engineer." ~ Brooks
Or even GPLed ;-)
If less people had the conviction to die doing crazy evil things, and more people sat around in jammies eating Shreddies, the world would be a better place
vore - eater
It must be carnivore on crack! Run for the hills!
> "The Nation's communications networks are
:)
> routinely used in the commission of serious
> criminal activities, including espionage."
Hmmm. So which large autonomous governmental organisations can we think of who do this...
> "The Carnivore device provides the FBI with
> a "surgical" ability to intercept and collect
> the communications which are the subject of the
> lawful order while ignoring those
> communications which they are not authorized to
> intercept."
Sure, it's surgical... in the same way that multiple amputations are surgical...
These sigs are more interesting tha
really, most people's *private* information is out there already. privacy is an illusion. took out a student loan? all 3 major credit bureaus have your info. use that convenient swipe-card to get a discount at the supermarket? they're tracking what you purchase. really, unless your somekinda ultra-paranoid tech-cypher-phag who spends his time rearranging the underwear in his dresser to keep the secret police from tracking your habits, i don't see the harm if the government spies on your little secret fetish sites 3 in the morning cuz you can't get the real thing.
But was that ever an issue, price?
Durring all of this hullaballoo about Carnivour and the FBI's right to hamfistedly and indiscriminatly monitor packet traffic, i don't once recall it being writtin.
"oh yeah and they're easier to get then wire-tap warrants, if these damn things were cheaper it would be green lights all the way bay-bee" -Special Agent Trent Squarenuts.
Evil tech exists, evil tech is being deployed and the guys that want to see it installed usually don't shop with coupons.
Ha... in France they caught a Homing pigeon with a note in arabic... how will the FBI try to intercept those? Using trained hawks or eagles?
Say that i was a terrorist... i would think twice before using e-mail or other tech to convey messages.. especially now i know they use this privacy invading crap....
Plus, you could acquire this relevant, semi-private set of URLs from us (including a year's free hosting), as a result of your interest in the brave gnu world of open/honest, dependable/secure, communications/commerce, &, your ability to follow simple directions.
don't even try to tell US that you haven't seen these guys, now featuring pictures of the REAL .commIEs.
If privacy is outlawed, only criminals will have IT.
God bless/help U.S..
Give us your crypto keys + If you refuse you go to jail (If you tell anyone you are under invstigation you go to jail for even longer)
Tell them you have forgot your keys or missplaced them and the burden of proof is on you to prove your innocence. Not on them to prove your guilt! (Tell me... how I'm supposed to prove I have forgoten something?)
Basicly this walks all over your rights to protect yourself from self-incriminaton and the right to be innocent untill proven guilty
Dont worry too much though, I'm waiting for the first test case to go to the European court of Human rights.... It cant last.
Anyone quoted by a reporter knows how little they understand
Don't believe what you read is the truth.
WTF!
$2,500 for a glorified packet sniffer, plus another $32k-42k for some dude to sit there and sort it all out / analise p0rn for stenographic messages! Somebody is seriously overpaid!
Seriously though. Can anyone out there say why this is so expensive?
Anyone quoted by a reporter knows how little they understand
Don't believe what you read is the truth.
I think the current ratio is 30 to 5 billion
The increased High Tech survailance won't stop this kind of terrorist attacks...
There isn't any proff that any high-tech device or crypted messages where used in anyway. This things tend to be organized head-to-head anyway, so place more survailance in all convencional devices, like snail mail, bathrooms etc...
All this when going up against a country where 75% of the computers are 286's - and there's no power supply for the other one.
Well, OK. As log as it costs less.
__
Do ya feel happy-go-lucky, punk?
The WTC bombers communicated in the clear, because no one knew enough to intercept their stuff.
You have to know who to spy on before this stuff does any good. That takes Intelligence. And intelligence.
Both are in short suply.
InstaPundit! Ahead of the Curve Since 30 Minutes Ago
Snail-mail has been surveilled since J. Edgar Hoover was trying on his first set of pumps and as for the bathroom surveillance... well here you go dude
why not ?
because the important messages are not sent through a U.S. ISP so this does not applie to them
why do you think that the NSA has listening posts in the UK and Australia ?
so it can listen to phone conversations in china, europe and middle east
why do you think they fly planes over china full of black boxs
this is just an attempt of a company to make money out of legislation, that concept is not exactly new
for what its worth I think an ISP should run Altivore at least then they know that it wont screw up their network
regards
john jones
Taken from antivore's faq http://www.robertgraham.com/pubs/carnivore-faq.htm l :
The FBI
cannot simply take one e-mail from this set and use it as evidence, they must
instead present to the court all e-mails captured during this time. If one
e-mail says "let's bomb the World Trade Center", but the next e-mail says "I
was only joking", then the FBI must present both to the defense team.
I don't know if anyone noticed this, but he's the next Nostradamus!
A lot of civil liberties proponents lose the plot at some point, and viciously attack any attempts at monitoring or interception. While I'm all for screaming blue murder about wholesale invasion of data and privacy, there is a point at which the state investigatory power that be require legitimate access to communications.
No, this would not have stopped Bin Laden & co, who communicated in public. Nor will it stop many related activites. But it is extremely effective against fraud and crime syndicates. I come from a country where these crimes are rife, and most convictions follow some form of search warrant.
The dividing line between good and bad is the inclusion of the court system into the process. Courts can already give permission for physical searches and wiretaps, subject to the provision of prima facae evidence. This is good.
Enough evidence must exist to convince a court that there is likely to be a crime, and that a particular person/group is likely to be implicated, before such a warrant will be issued.
There should be no difference for digital communications. Wiretaps could be used along with equipment to translate the wire signal into packet data, but this is inefficient. Just a telecoms companies are obliged to cooperate with the police (FBI), so ISPs, arguably the carrier for TCP/IP based data, should be obliged to cooperate (although not necessarily at their own cost).
When it comes to encrypted communication, the lines blur a little more, but only a little. You can be prosecuted for refusing to acknowledge a search warrant, or for refusing to testing (except in cases involving the Fifth Ammendment; and many countries don't have an equivalent), or for withholding evidence; so you should be able to be prosecuted for not providing the cleartext to an encrypted communication and, if necessary, proving it is a decryption of the ciphertext.
i-name =twylite [http://public.xdi.org/=twylite], see idcommons.net
Every time one of these articles gets posted, nearly everyone goes into "ultra paranoid" mode and thinks that the entire world is out to get them and that the government is the enemy. Why?!!
You're not important enough to be concerned about! They've got better things to do than intercept and read your e-mail to Aunt Betty.
And *So what* if you're getting logged? You're not looking at child pornography are you? If all you're doing is reading slashdot and downloading FreeBSD ISOs, who is going to care? Every time you use a mobile phone you are broadcasting your privacy over the air (all someone has to do is grab it). Ever used an ATM? Well, your photo got taken. Been abroad? Your passport got logged. And oops, your library card got scanned when you last checked out Dr. Suess.
if a judge signs a wiretap order the FBI can bug your phone because you're a criminal suspect. Grow up, this is the law in the US. Carnivore is just another tool to wiretap email and internet access in general.
Since everyone thinks they are so smart here, would you care to describe a solution to wiretap the internet communications of suspected criminals without scannin the packets of everyone else?
any devent crime syndicates have crypto and look out for things like keyboard taps
so really its a silly thing to say
all the criminals have crypto and really dont care about this
its back to actually solveing crime the old ways instead of recording phones and opening mail
regards
john jones
Altivore being available , even if it needs a lil
debugging is bad news.For some reason i dont like the idea that this peice of shit could land
in the hands of private investigators and be used for all sorts of reasons.One being blackmail
divirce cases and industrial spying.
Call me paranoid but this is chilling.
One more for the road barman...
Just to follow through (because CALEA was mentioned in the intro), the FBI wanted CALEA to cover email and other Internet communications, but Congress refused. They exempted the Internet explicitly (I don't have the exact language of the law at hand). I believe that one of the major effects of Ashcroft's Anti-Terrorism Act (now PATRIOT) is to extend CALEA so something like Carnivore can be brought into play.
I'm holding out for carGNivore.
Or GNOC (GNOC's Not Carnivore)
Evil is the money of root.
http://www.entelagent.com/surveillance_agent.html
What simple-minded idiots want the authorities to have access to everything you do?
Government say about surveillance - "you've nothing to fear - if you are not breaking the law"
This argument is made to pressure people into acquiesce - else appear guilty.
It does not address the real reason, why they want this information - they want a surveillance society.
They wish to invade your basic human right to privacy.
This is like having somebody watching everything you do - all your thoughts, hopes and fears will be open to them.
All your finances for them to scrutinize - heaven help you if you cannot account for every cent when they check on your taxes.
Do not believe the lies of Government - even more money spent on Carnivore will not protect you.
Do you not think - even once encryption back doors and greater surveillance are introduced, and you could guarantee the impossible - that they could defeat all steganography:
That - when not planning face to face, terrorists will just have to send personal couriers - or get caught?
Perhaps give mobile for single message when required - just using message - go with plan a / b or abort.
Incidentely, the United States Department of Commerce and the United Nations World Intellectual Property Organization hide solution to trademark use on the Internet. Please visit WIPO.org.uk.
Thank you for a rare note of sanity on /.
/. have elevetated certain rights to such an extreme that they deny *ANY* legitimate police power. Ironically at the same time they are blind to more serious overreaching by the state that threatens other rights not as elevated as the "right" to perfect anonymity & privacy.
ALL police powers (all government powers for that matter) involve some "violation" of our rights. They carry cuffs and have jails and prisons to "violate" your right to liberty, they carry guns to "violate" your right to life (as a last resort hopefully) And they question you, execute search warrants, wire tapping warrants etc. to "violate" your right to privacy.
The fact is a police state is not the only threat to liberty, anarchy is just as bad, and is usually a precurser to a police state. The police powers to "violate" our rights is a balance designed (when working right) to maximise our freedoms and rights. The government has the power and authority, granted by the governed, to "violate" the rights of individuals who have or are suspected of violating or planning to violate the rights of the rest of us.
Don't get me wrong, I think we must always be on guard against overreaching by the state. But often people on
So that they can evesdrop on US citizens.
Seriously, it is "illegal" for the US gov to monitor its own citizens, so Autralia and the UK do it for them and give the data to the US.
In return the US monitors the UK people and gives the data to the UK gov.
A simple solution to evading the laws. And no I'm not a conspiricy nut. This was mentioned in the European Union investigation into Echelon. See http://www.aclu.org/echelonwatch/highlights.html for more info.
Anyone quoted by a reporter knows how little they understand
Don't believe what you read is the truth.
All of the planes except one had five hijackers. The reason is that most likely we already had in custody the fifth - a man detained on immigration charges because he was a suspected terrorist and was suspiciously learning to fly a commercial jet & asking about flying over NY airspace but had no interest in taking off or landing.
The guy was arrested on immigration charges rather than put under surveilance. The FBI field office asked but was refused a counterintelligence surveilance warrent because a suspected terrorist learning to fly a plane and particularly interested in New York City airspace was not enough for "probable cause"
Story Here
To be fair, if they had just searched his hard drive they probably wouldn't have had enough to know what the terrorists were up to. On the other hand if he had remained free but under surveillance it seems likely we would have been able to gather enough intelligence on this cell to figure it out before hand.
So, what's the deal? Why do you need carnivore in the first place?
Say you're an ISP and the FBI shows up with a warrant and their carnivore doo hickey. They want Joe Blow's email and Internet traffic. OK. You tell them, since you got a warrant I have to comply, but you aren't using carnivore. I'll just dump all of Joe's email with a forward file that gives his email to him and puts it in a file for you guys to get. Since you want everything he does on the Internet. I'll just make sure that he always gets the same IP address when his modem dials in and his account authenticates, and just dump all of his packets to disk for you. This way you get what's in your warrant and nothing more than whats in your warrant.
I don't see why we need crap like carnivore just to get one suspect's email.
There is something else going on here, and you don't have to look too hard to find it!
Just be sure to wear the gold uniform when you beam down -- you know what happens when you wear the red one.
here are a few examples, and I'll try to keep them easy for you. I bank online (encryption is a MUST) and I dialin to work (I work at a large datacenter in the Midwest, don't always have to drive in at 3 am in the snow, you know?), not to mention I send/receive email with many corp. execs in different states. Oh yeah, I hate targeted popup ads. Thanks for playing numbnuts.
it's not the "catching the real criminal" that's the problem, it's the potential for abuse that this type of stuff opens up (not to mention ALL of the potential loss of freedom & privacy we are now facing). Don't try to tell me that the FBI has always played nice and NOT used some laws to their advantage over innocent people. Remember that story recently about some old man, innocent of course, released after 25 years? Look for it (I'm right, but lazy) and you'll read that the FBI KNEW he was innocent. Yep.
You rule. My hat goes off to you.
Whay not jsut require that mail servers archive a copy of each letter sent. It is possibly. Usually mail servers just delete the mail after it is sent, it could be easily made to archive a copy of each email. Then you can send it all as spam to the FBI and see how long it takes them to read. I know I have a tough time reading the email I get each day.
Only 'flamers' flame!
Nazi Germany had courts too, they were called Gestoppo uinstead of your Honor.
Goddard ivokes thee.
17'$ 34$y 70 |)3f347 c4r|\|1v0r3, ju$7 c0|\|v3r7 4|| y0ur 73x7 70 |337 $p34|!
Doesnt matter, the FBI will find out who you are when they get your IP from andover.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Why do you think ivi's comment about the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, entitled 'Aussies to lose right to remain silent...', was referring to US laws and the FBI?
Ask me if I've been required to disclose any crypto keys.