Why Did The FBI Retire Carnivore?

We posted earlier this week that the FBI has officially dropped Carnivore, its "privacy respecting" eavesdropping program. Now reader Throtex writes "Professor Orin Kerr at the George Washington University Law School, a member of the Volokh Conspiracy discusses why Carnivore came to be in the first place and why it really was terminated (about two years ago). Essentially, the media (as usual) got a bit carried away with a non-story: Carnivore was designed to protect your rights from being invaded while sniffing only suspect data. Carnivore was dropped because, as of two years ago, the available tools met the necessary privacy standards, as Prof. Kerr noted in his article about the PATRIOT Act published at the time."

Comments

Re:The reason why Carnivore failed...

[plover]

Well, they could have just downloaded "Altivore", an open-source version of Carnivore. Of course, Altivore didn't come out until after Carnivore was released (causing the big controversy) but it was written to answer the questions of "what is the FBI snooping" and "what kinds of privacy do the other ISP customers have"? It also provided people a chance to see that it was secure, that "evil hackers" couldn't take over the Altivore box and subvert it for their own nefarious purposes.

Wiretapping has been outsourced to Verisign

[Animats]

Verisign, the first name in wiretapping, offers their NetDiscovery service to law enforcement. In their words,

• Complete Lawful Intercept Service

  VeriSign's NetDiscovery service provides telecom network operators, cable operators, and Internet service providers with a streamlined service to help meet requirements for assisting government agencies with lawful interception and subpoena requests for subscriber records. Net Discovery is the premier turnkey service for provisioning, access, delivery, and collection of call information from operators to law enforcement agencies (LEAs).

Verisign does this for telephony by using (or abusing) their control of Signalling System 7., the routing network for telephony. When a wiretap request comes in, they change the SS7 routing data to route calls to/from the phone of interest to their call monitoring center, from which the call is then routed outward again. To the telephone network, this looks like call forwarding. This approach requires no additional hardware at the wireline carrier; it's done through the existing SS7 infrastructure. (Incidentally, this should increase latency, depending on how far you are from Northern Virginia. But they may have remote monitoring centers by now to cut that down.)

Verisign also offers wiretapping services for mobile phones, and cable-based VoIP.

Efforts are underway to integrate NetDiscovery capability into future Cisco routers.

Verisign takes the carrier or ISP completely out of the loop. "Authorized Government agencies" can submit their wiretapping request to Verisign, where they are "reviewed by a paralegal" and then implemented. There's no need for the carrier or ISP to even be aware of the wiretap.

So that's why there's no need for Carnivore any more.

Verisign - your full service wiretapping solution provider.

McAfee & commercial vendors are the new Carniv

[glassesmonkey]

The FBI is just turning to contractors and newer technology than maintaining the old Carnivore.

McAfee Inc has sold its McAfee Research assets to US defense contractor Sparta Inc for an undisclosed sum, after post-9/11 politics made much of its research output classified.
13 Jan 2005, 09:39 GMT -
"In response to rapidly changing national directions, much of the content of McAfee Research's efforts has transitioned from historically unclassified research to classified R&D activities," the firm said.
The unit has previously worked with government agencies such as DARPA and the NSA on projects including technologies such as forensics, intrusion prevention and malicious code defense.

Also, the budget for FBI Carnivore is probably now under Homeland Security who is outsourcing such activites.

According to leading market analyst Input Inc., the federal government will increase its spending on information technology in 2005 for the eleventh consecutive year in a row.

Outsourcing, homeland security, and the nation's global war on terrorism are driving a significant increase in spending. For that reason, the Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security alone will be spending in excess of $32 billion this year on information technology,"
FOSE 2005 kicks off the buying season for the 25,000 government IT and acquisition professionals who plan their major buys for the year.

Also, you would think the FBI looks into child pornography, but...

Child pornography has become a huge problem for DoD investigators, accounting for as much as 50 percent of the criminal digital evidence processing work done by the DoD's Defense Cyber Crime Center (DC3). The DoD blocked and traced 60,000 intrusion attempts on its unclassified networks in 2004, and wrestles with spam, illicit pornography and other common Internet threats.