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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."
I would be more concerned about things like ECHELON anyway.
Speaking of ECHELON, maybe the reason people get so carried away with conspiracy theories is that our government is so bloody set against telling its own people what it does. AFAIK, even though a couple of European countries on the ECHELON project have admitted their membership, the U.S. government continues to deny such a thing even exists.
If this were a truly free country, we wouldn't have a government that's so hellbent on keeping things a secret. You can talk about the practical reasons behind keeping things secret to protect our interests and the people involved in the operations, but that doesn't change the fact that it makes the country non-free in the actual sense, and it gives people a very good reason to be jittery about snooping projects.
When the government is known to clam up and hide things, how can you ever be sure it's telling you the truth about its projects and that they really do what they're saying they do?
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
I blame PETA.
No, no, NO!!
I read it on SLASHDOT!! The Gubmint wants to read my e-mail! It's part of their Total Information Awareness plot to put me in JAIL! They want to label me a TERRORIST and send me to GITMO!!
Don't tell me it's not true! It's on the INTERNET for crying out loud!
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
When I stop using a system it is usually because I have something better.
You're rejoicing that the FBI retired Carnivore. What Carnivore allowed was the collection of information, then the decryption and analysis of that data with a court order. They retired it because USA PATRIOT allows them to just collect it the good old fashioned way...no encryption, no court order. Whomever, whenever they want. The difference is that now they can look for suspicious activity via eavesdropping instead of first having a suspicion and confirming it via eavesdropping. You are celebrating that the FBI has thrown away their lock picks and not realizing that Congress has removed all your doors.
Public use of any portable music system is a virtually guaranteed indicator of sociopathic tendencies. -- Zoso
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.
SpyDock: Scientific Python in a Docker container
If you don't encrypt your email and web traffic, you have no "reasonable expectation" of privacy. Apparently, "addressing information" - that is, packet headers - are not a part of confidential communications, and as such, it does not represent an invasion of privacy to read them.
While I understand his argument that PATRIOT merely made pre-existing wiretap laws apply to the internet, this fact alone doesn't make the existing laws right. For example, just knowing who called who when, even without revealing the details of content, does significantly invade one's privacy. In these times when someone can be detained simply because they "may have knowledge of a criminal act", divulging the websites a person visits is still too dangerous. Someone concerned about the rise of radical Islam could easily be detained as a "potential terrorist" simply because they did some independent research on Islam using the internet. Even scanning addressing information alone is too much power for a government in which the mere declaration that one is an "enemy combatant" can be used to arbitrarily deny one's civil liberties.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
he FBI performed only eight Internet wiretaps in fiscal 2003 and five in fiscal 2002; none used the software initially called Carnivore and later renamed the DCS-1000, according to FBI documents submitted to Senate and House oversight committees. The FBI, which once said Carnivore was "far better" than commercial products, said previously it had used the technology about 25 times between 1998 and 2000.
Carnivor was not a system designed to watch Internet traffic 24/7/365 and flag stuff that looked like potential usefull data on random people. It was used to monitor people who were already under investigation.
I don't hear many people cry foul over a regular telephone wiretap, which is done for the same reasons under the same circumstances - they wiretap telephones of people who are already under investigation (I realize that Eschelon is different, but Eschelon is not a telephone wiretap on a suspect's phone. Its a wiretap on all communications, or so some people claim).
And the Patriot Act does require a court order to do most things. Its just that its not the courts that we think about. Its a secret court. There have been articles on the very subject.
I don't believe that the FBI simply randomly picks people to monitor and do searches of houses at random, etc. There is some "oversight", although to most of us, that "oversight" is secret (yes, that can lead to abuse).
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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.
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