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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?"
If they retired carnivore, it's likely only because now they have something "better".. or "worse" depending on how you look at it.
Don't Tread on Me
Instead, the bureau turned to unnamed commercially-available products to conduct Internet surveillance thirteen times in criminal investigations in that period.
How much does it cost? I'm really sick of paying for this crap.
fast as fast can be. you'll never catch me.
They wouldn't have retired it unless they 1. Created a new app that supercedes it or 2. Found another way to retrieve the same information more effectively. Federal security agencies are kinda funny like that.
HaHaHaHa!
...hello new echelon iteration?
They didn't just give up a method of infiltration - that's just foolish.
no news here. move along. nothing has changed.
The FBI has announced that their universally criticized Carnivore system has been retired. Who wants to bet that it's just been renamed, and expanded with those "commercial" search tools? You are, since you're reading this. And if you're American, you're paying for the casino! Don't you feel safer, with the government lying to you for your own good, to protect you from the terror of $500M FBI projects that don't work?
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make install -not war
Privacy never even crossed their minds.
It's tragic. Laugh.
We have always been at war with Eastasia.
There's a tradeoff with encryption. On the one hand, you make your email harder (impossible? do we really know?) to read for unauthorized third parties. On the other hand, given the percentage of people who use encryption, your emails will stick out like a sore thumb to the FBI/NSA/whoever as something worth investigating.
I know this is not fair; I don't have to be doing something criminal in order to want privacy. But I really wouldn't be surprised if encrypting your email nowadays raises a red flag in whatever carnivore-replacement program they're running.
Imposing Libertarian views on everyone online since 1992.
Someone is perhaps unaware of how the economy *actually* works.
The FBI paid to develop carnivore - and then the developers took side jobs developing these commercial equivalents, which they sold to the FBI. These commercial equivalents would never have come into existence if the Feds hadn't taken on the cost of the initial phase of development, and, from the look of things, provided an initial customer base for this software. The exact same thing happened with total information awareness (now a product being sold out of a cayman islands holding corporation or the like), in case you were not paying attention.
You may not like this sort of arrangement, but in that case you must really hate all the money the Feds wasted on information technology, automation, container shipping, or avionics, all of which were developed more-or-less the same way.
Of course, you can approve of this sort of arrangement without approving of it's use in this particular case, but that isn't the objection you raise.
If the FBI were a company... heads would roll. This wouldn't be acceptable.
How adorable! A Capitalist! Does woo believe in the free market? Does woo? Yes woo does!
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
Your local NSA agent, c/o your local FBI agent.
"If we let things terrify us, life will not be worth living."
- Seneca
E-Mail is just as secure as a postcard. Don't send secret information via either one.
There's a big difference between John Q. Hacker, and perhaps some waywardly curious employee somewhere spying on what I do, and the government doing the same thing. Because the government makes and enforces the rules, it is held to a higher standard. That standard is elaborated in the 4th Amendment- there has to be a REASON for the the government to be looking at anyone's mail, and that reason must suggest that they have either broken the law, or there is good reason to believe that they are about to break the law. If neither exists, they have business looking at it, even if it's not "private".