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Dartmouth Student Invents A Carnivore Leash
timdorr writes: "Looks like a student at Dartmouth wants to turn Carnivore into a much more resonable tool according to this Wired article. I'd personally feel a lot less invaded if I knew the system was in place and in this form. Hopefully the government takes notice becuase Carnivore still seems like quite a loophole for our government to exploit."
How soon before this student will be detained for 'Un-American' behavior?
"Why did they cancel my favorite Sci-Fi show? I downloaded ALL the episodes!"
This would certainly limit the FBI from snooping a post containing the words bomb, blow up, embassy, congress, and president. This guys idea would essentially ruin the Carnivore project. As much as I would like for my freedom to be protected, I do not like the idea of someone sniffing my underwear(computer) for shit stains(anything they deem illegal).
Great, just what we need- something comes along to make the public think it's perfectly okay for the government to monitor email. I don't care how secure it is, I would still rather have no government monitoring at all than even a system that would guaranteed not to be prone to abuse.
The Wired article didn't go into too much detail, but I can see a couple of potential problems here..
- how exactly does the FBI (or whatever) specify *what* they're looking for? Searching for "all traffic containing the keywords TERROR, BOMB, COCAINE and OSAMA" sounds like Carnivore as is, and would be pretty easy to defeat anyway. Anyone remember "The Longest Day", in which the Allies sent messages re: the date of the D-Day invasion over clear channel radio, using a code based on a Rimbaud (I think) poem?
- the data vault might hold the FBI/NSA/whoever to their warrant, it does nothing about intentionally vague/overreaching warrants or the laws that enable them.
- re: using this system to keep medical/financial/etc. info private: Hardly a catch all solution, the data vault can't stop companies from spreading/selling your info after you've given it to them in confidence.
- If these do become commonplace, how long before a bungled police investigation results in evidence being lost because of one of these things self destructing? And once that happens, how long until they become outlawed?
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I guess, for me anyway, the irony here is that a single student did this. Not the FBI or any other agency/department of the government, but a private citizen had to come up with a way to harness and focus the power of Carnivore. I know the FBI probably could have done so themselves, or any other company/corporation, but they didn't. Never underestimate the power of the individual.
...we are from the government - we are here to help...
The problem is the people have huge misconceptions about Carnivore. Being concerned about personal privacy, I chose to research Carnivore for an Ethics class at school. I found that Carnivore is pretty much just misunderstood; it is really incapable of doing any large-scale surveillance. There's an independant review that was conducted by IITRI last year that points out that Carnivore is the safest of any online monitoring tool and that it is incapable of wantonly collecting data. Incidentally, the report suggests that Carnivore be open-sourced. Fat chance.
The real issue is whether or not it's right to perform surviellance. I think that it can be necessary at times (with the required warrants) but I also think that it needs to be taken more seriously and greater restrictions need to be in place to ensure that it is only used in extreme situations. If you think that Carnivore could invade your privacy, read up on how many wiretaps are used every year. Carnivore is used much less and is safer to boot. The real problem here is whether the government should be allowed to monitor communications at all, not that Carnivore gives the government some awesome new powers of data capture.
njord
By the way, I really have no association with the government. I'm just a left-winger college student that did a little research and was surprised by what I found.
Even if the FBI physically seized the vault, legally or otherwise, it's supposed to be just about impossible for the cops to crack. Iliev's program runs on an IBM 4758 cryptographic coprocessor, designed to destroy itself if it detects an intrusion attempt. (emphasis added)
I'm curious about this passage from the article. Would the ISP have a backup copy or does it completely eradicate the information? Would it destroy all the Carnivore data at an ISP or just the files that a "hacker" was trying to access?
And finally, if the FBI got a warrant(?) to request the e-mails from a certain person, couldn't that person engineer a "hack" attempt on his own files, thus triggering their destruction before the FBI could access them?
Simply take them to their logical end.
The fact that Carnivore exists, in any form, indicates that the government wants access to all your communications, to know exactly what it is you're saying and hearing.
This modified Carnivore is an attempt to claw a way back up the slippery slope when you've already hit bottom.
You're only real options are either not to say or do or listen to anything the government might find objectionable, or encrypt all your communications.
668: Neighbour of the Beast
I know... Let's turn the net into the wild west, where the person with the fastest ping flooder wins. "Ugh! Ya got me sheriff!" While I would like to be so naive as to think that the net could survive without regulation, the sad facts are that the very thing that makes it so useful to us is the same thing that makes it useful to foriegn (and domestic) entities looking to do us harm. Yes, I know they can find other ways to do it, but not quite as quick and efficiently as on the net. Our entire society is rapidly going digital and that real estate is going to need some kind of defense and monitoring, just like the boarders of our nation.
The big debatable question is how you do it. I think it was an interview with Neal Stephonson posted to Slash that correctly noted that it's not nessisarily the monitoring of our lives, but whether that monitoring has a watchdog in place to keep the power from being abused. Personally, I think Alex has the right idea. You need a search warrent to enter an search a house and likewise you'd need something similar to access somebodies digital "life", both requiring just cause. I'm not saying that they're not prone to abuse, but it'd sure go a long ways in the right direction.
Unfortunately, the problem I see with Alex's system is not it's security, but in what Carny was originally designed to do. It is an evidence collector, designed to proactively track names and keywords, not wait for the e-police to have just cause to raid a database. Putting a search warrent lock on Carny defeats the entire purpose of having a system that illuminates potential problems before they happen. I think there acually needs to be a group that monitors everything the CIA/FBI/FIAA pulls from Carny and asks if it's A) relevant to the defense of our nation and B) Even ethical. That's the counter balance systems like Carnivore need, not simply a padlock.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
Carnivore is just the domestic version of the Echelon system for use on americans by americans.
Echelon is used for those situations where your government wants to read information on foreign companies, organisations & individuals.
I wonder how many tourists, immigrants and US citizens that work for foreign owned companies or belong to international organisations there are.
It could easily be over 12 million people in the USA at any time are being watched by Big Brother.
Carnivore is just the tip of the iceberg on this issue.
- Kaos games and encryption systems developer
Hello EFF, gonna set such a service up or just gonna whine about the record industry all the time? ACLU, what about you?
(I know they could still track some traffic to/from the network, but surely not all of it, and much less efficiently than being able to actually browse through a stored history of mails.)