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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.
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....
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.
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
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.