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Carnivore Update
A reader writes: "Yahoo has a news item about the continued use of DCS-1000 AKA Carnivore. Looks like it's being used more than ever, and some privacy groups are still fighting in court for more disclosure about its use."
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"Carnivore is not deployed on our network," Shaw said. "We certainly do comply with law enforcement, but we do so in a way that does not compromise our users' privacy."
How does that work, exactly? Does Earthlink force you to use military-grade encryption prior to subscribing?
Carnivore is not here to 'keep us safe'. It's here to keep us quiet. Thank you John Asscroft, for making sure no one speaks out without repercussions.
BTW: The terrorists have already won...the election.
Even with the recent evolution in factoring, there's no match for a properly set-up pgp/gpg.
Why bother to rely on their niceness when you can easily be rather sure nobody reads your important mails?
"Still, SecurityFocus incident analyst Ryan Russell said the events of September 11th changed many citizens' minds.
"I think there is a lot less concern from the majority of people that they're going to be monitored," Russell told NewsFactor."
OK, now prove it. No one likes their communications being monitored. Has anyone actually gone out and ASKED people if they mind being monitored? Or is this more of the well, they don't seem to mind because they aren't bitching about it type of logic?
This cop-out crap about 9-11 changing the way everyone thinks of privacy is beginning to get extremely old. 9-11 was a national tragedy. Don't use it to slam dunk crap legislation down our throats...once you have gathered the wraith of enough people, then maybe you will listen. Most Americans are UN-EDUCATED on these matters. They also probably think that in order to be caught up in this, you need to be some militia-type with a bunch of ammo and automatic weapons to be investigated. Sad, really....
Sent from your iPad.
FBI Headquarters, Director's Office, Present:
DATA ANALYST: Good Afternoon, Sir. Here is the latest report from Carnivore.
FBI DIRECTOR: Who the fuck is this Bernard Shifman?
DATA ANALYST: He's a moron spammer, sir. We're trying to get his e-mails excluded as we speak.
OTOH, a large percentage of the East Coast's Internet infrastructure was located in and around WTC, and much was destroyed and/or shut down. Different routes were certainly used while this stuff was under repair.
sPh
You may not be familiar with SMTP servers like sendmail, postfix, etc. Mails that are sent from clients go into a queue. In the case of larger ISPs with many many users, the mail servers handle quite a bit of mail, so messages may sit in queue for longer.
The order that they are sent out of the queue in is determined by settings set by the administrator. Some SMTP servers are actually setup so that small-sized messages get priority over bigger messages. Since most e-mails are small, your larger messages with attachments may sit in the queue longer, waiting for a bunch of smaller messages to be sent.
This queueing depends on the mostly on the *senders* mail server. The receivers mail server will generally put messages from the receive queue into the users mailboxes in the order they came in, but not always.
Have your mail client display all headers...these show where the mail was along its route and typically have date/time stamps on them. This will help you determine where the hold up is (on the sender's mail server, on your mail server, etc.) Look for the length of time between timestamps. If one is unusually longer than the rest, that's where the hold up is. I'm not saying it's not Carnivore, but what you describe is a fairly common occurrence.
My journal has hot
You said "If this is what it takes in this modern day and age for the law enforcement agencies to protect us, so be it. "
As Ben Franklin said ->"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Perhaps this will help you understand why it is important to stop this now.
"The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing -- when you let the small evils pass, larger ones follow." Edmund Burke.
"He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster." - Nietzsche
Or try this on for size
"First they came for the Communists,
and I didn't speak up,
because I wasn't a Communist.
Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn't speak up,
because I wasn't a Jew.
Then they came for the Catholics,
and I didn't speak up,
because I was a Protestant.
Then they came for me,
and by that time there was no one
left to speak up for me."
by Rev. Martin Niemoeller, 1945
Maybe all you do is check hockey scores, but some of us do real work on the Internet. Think about this, for example: What if I wanted John Ashcroft's job, and I was using email on the Internet to plan my campaign strategy. Maybe we can trust John Ashcroft not to take advantage of his position to protect his own interests, but what about the rest of the people in his organization? Do you want to bet your democracy on it? As a rule, in the US, we don't grant this level of inherent trust to our elected officials; we've found it unnecessary because we've created a government based on a set of checks and balances. A lot of people made a lot of sacrifices to bring you the democracy your enjoy today. You disrespect their memory to abandon what they've built just to make your own ass a bit safer for a while.
Carnivore allows one branch to "snoop" on the other two (and every citizen as well). Carnivore is root access to the email system.
Maybe we can trust John Ashcroft, but ask yourself this: Why is this administration demanding the ability to look at the inner workings of all other organizations (Carnivore), and simultaneously blocking requests by other organixations to find out about the administrations inner workings (energy policy scandal)?
The thing about things we don't know is we often don't know we don't know them.
Right, carnivore (in my understanding at least) does sniff all traffic, and stores it for a set period of time. However (and it's a big however), if the FBI wants to go in and read anything that's been sniffed, it needs to get a warrant. And the warrant doesn't say "we want to open the box"...it says "we want to open the box, and read only emails to person X from date y to date z"
And if you think it's easy to just hop in and get a warrant, I suggest you go read 'Black Mass' - it will shed some light on your misconceptions.
Juiced? Or Not?
Here are the folks that make it:
N etDetect or_Data_Sheet.pdf
www.niksun.com
Carnivore is called NetDetector for commercial sales.
http://www.niksun.com/products/pdf_files/
About $20k, runs on BSD.