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?"

Comments

Yea...

[Heem]

If they retired carnivore, it's likely only because now they have something "better".. or "worse" depending on how you look at it.

Security update

[SilverspurG]

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.

Re:Security update

[Mostly a lurker]

The cost is not the issue for me. Law enforcement costs money, but a certain amunt of it is necessaey. What I DO object to is law enforcement being allowed to operate without proper controls. That leads to a police state.

Internet users' privacy?

[jbrandv]

HaHaHaHa!

Atkins is meat.

[Doc Ruby]

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?

We have never been at war with Eurasia.

[Anonymous Coward]

We have always been at war with Eastasia.

Re:It Means

[tabdelgawad]

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.

Re:What about the budget

[sam_handelman]

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!