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Carnivore No More
wikinerd writes "FBI has retired the controversial Carnivore software, strongly criticized by privacy advocates for its email capturing abilities. However, it is believed that unspecified commercial surveillance tools are employed now. What does that mean for Internet users' privacy?"
Not if they don't know what key was used... A better way would be to encrypt the actual e-mail itself instead of relying on the way it is transmitted to keep your content secure. You can never trust the messenger.
thisnukes4u.net
Carnivore relied heavily on a product called SilentRunner. SilentRunner was purchased by Computer Associates and given a new name, Network Forensics.
http://www3.ca.com/Solutions/Product.asp?ID=4856
It has the ability to decode email on the fly. I have the product and while it does have some "wow" factor, the usability and stability is atrocious. Another fine cobbled together product from CA.
Kidding aside, just the like alleged dismantling of the "Office of Strategic Influence" (i.e., intentionally lying to the press), things may go on [CNN] under different project names. cf. also the Total, er, Terrorism, Information Awareness program.
yes, Carnivore was opensourced in 2001 by a group calling themselves RSG. it was covered on slashdot. of course tcpdump is still better if all you want is to packet sniff, but this other version is good for realtime data visualization.
Ever heard of Clearsight or AppDancer? Same product, they just changed their name. It's technically a network analyzer, but you can also "see" all sorts of network traffic.
You can watch an FTP session while it happens, telnet as well. You can listen in on SIP conversations, watch web pages be downloaded (not in a web browser but you can see what files they are and then click to see).
If it can do that, then you should not be surprised that it can also read e-mails, and the viewer mimics a standard e-mail client (so even the dumbest can understand what's going on).
Sure it'll do packed dumps like ethereal, et al. But if you take the packet dumps from another program and load them up in it, it'll reconstruct the network traffic and show you what went on.
Needless to say the first time I saw the program in action I about crapped my pants.
At roughly $5,000 dollars it's practically free to the government, runs on java, and any decent machine with a network card can run it. Any yes, it also works with wireless cards that can be put into promiscuous mode.
Hushmail does, and it was free last time I checked. The pay service has alot more features, but for a hotmail/gmail/etc.. substitue it's note bad.