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

My theory

[spike2131]

As someone currenly job hunting in the DC/Baltimore area, I am amazed by the number of programming jobs that require security clearances. If you have a security clearace and took a couple java classes in college, government contractors will shower you with job offers. The requisite for getting a job on these projects, therefor, is not being a talented programmer, it is having a clearance that says you aren't a spy.

The result, I'm convinced, is that they hire a lot of sub-standard programmers, who create poorly designed products at great expense. And if the product doesn't work, well, thats another $100 million of taxpayer money down the drain.

These outfits need to either figure out a way to use better programmers who don't have security clearances, or figure out how to get good programmers cleared without a 2 year delay. Until that happens, a lot of substandard coders will contiue to write failed applications on the taxpayer dollar.