New Big Brother FBI E-Mail CARNIVORE
 Scanner A Meat Eater.

 

The FBI will keep the black box locked up in a protected container and come by once a day or once a week and collect the data it has required from each ISP. The system would not only be able to collect all e-mail but all the ISP's customers web surfing habits and banking transactions and all forms of online activity. Now remember, the FBI is the same government organization that withheld evidence from the government's own prosecutors during the Oklahoma City Murray Building Bomb Trial Case. They were the same squad who shot Randy Weavers wife, child, and dog at Ruby Ridge and tried to cover it up. This is the same FBI bunch who tried to hide their tracks in the Waco Texas branch Davidians by denying they had fired incendiary devices into the compound which may have started the fire that killed over 70 men, women and children. I think the public needs to invoke a black box on the FBI and begin a investigation on violations of the RICO Law by the governments own agencies such as the FBI and CIA who seem immune from any type of crime or prosecution.

ACLU spokesman Barry Steinhardt sent a critical letter to members of congress stating," There is no way a ISP company knows what this CARNIVORE program is doing inside their system". The FBI takes the position of 'Trust Us, were the government, open your entire network to us.' Members of The Internet Alliance Trade Association (IATA) have voiced their distrust about Big Brother having complete access to their system. Many IATA ISP giants such as Earthlink, AOL, MCI WorldCom have said they will not install the FBI device in a Wall Street Journal July 14,2000 article. 

Earthlink technology spokesman Steve Doughtery stated the CARNIVORE program has the potential to cripple it's network which could effect thousands of people and industries. If the FBI or the CIA can't even have knowledge of national security issues such as India and Pakistan's nuclear tests in 1999 after the devices were detonated or even protect their own web sites from being hacked by teenagers, I think their CARNIVORE system should be put on the National Security Agencies Computer Network  to see if it works before putting the whole American Internet Industry in their incompetent hands. The American Civil Liberties Union, urged Congress to amend outdated electronic privacy laws following news of an FBI system capable of large scale email interception and analysis. "There's no clear law that authorizes Carnivore," said ACLU associate director Barry Steinhardt. "But the FBI and the Justice Department ... will argue that there's no clear law that prohibits it. And Congress needs to put some real limits on what law enforcement can do."

The American Civil Liberties Union has filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the FBI, asking for information about the agency's "Carnivore" surveillance system, which is designed to monitor traffic on an Internet service provider's network. According to Barry Steinhardt, associate director of the ACLU, the request is believed to be the first that asks for the source code, or the set of instructions for a program that are compiled into object code, which computers understand. The ACLU requests all agency records related to the FBI's electronic surveillance programs, including Carnivore, Omnivore and Etherpeek. Those records may include letters, e-mail messages, tape recordings, technical manuals, computer source
code and object code. "Carnivore is a black box through which all the electronic communication flows in an ISP network. The ISP knows what is going in, but we don't know what the FBI is taking out of it," Steinhardt says. "The FBI is saying, 'Trust us, we're not violating anybody's privacy,' but we have a long history of government abuse of surveillance powers that teaches us we can't simply trust them." The FBI has 20 business days to respond to the FOIA request. The ACLU is worthy of it's actions but to think any law enforcement, especially the FBI will comply totally with the Freedom of Information Act , is
living in a dream world.

House Majority Leader Dick Armey of Texas issued a statement calling on U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno and FBI Director Louis Freeh to "stop using this cyber snooping system until Fourth Amendment concerns are adequately addressed." Reno said during her weekly press briefing that she would launch an investigation into the privacy implications of Carnivore, which she said she learned of through newspaper reports on Wednesday. She also said that although she knew the FBI had surveillance capabilities like those used by Carnivore, she did not know of the application or that it was already in use. This is a perfect example of how Big Brother runs rampant without even complying with the The President or the Attorney General of the U.S.  The controversies surrounding FBI surveillance in the information age will be addressed at a House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution hearing on July 24,2000. The ACLU has been asked to testify.

As reported by the Wall Street Journal, EarthLink went to court to challenge Carnivore's legality after the ISP was asked by the FBI to allow agents to install the surveillance system on its network. EarthLink argued that the court order that the FBI followed did not meet the standards necessary for the type of information the system would obtain. A court magistrate sided with the FBI and upheld the order, but EarthLink technically is prevented from installing Carnivore because it doesn't work with the ISP's current operating system software and crashes servers when used with an older version of the system software, according to company spokesman Kurt Rahn. " When we were approached to put something on our system that monitored our members' usage, that's a big concern to us," Rahn says. "We don't know what it does or doesn't do. This is something from the top of the organization to the bottom of the organization that we've been against for some while."

The FBI had used a "pen register" court order, typically used to record telephone numbers dialed from a particular phone. The FBI justified this by saying that it wanted to be able to see e-mail headers. But because of the way Internet packet technology has been developed, those headers cannot be viewed separately from other parts of messages. David Sobel, counsel for the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, D.C., says that is equivalent to eavesdropping, for which agencies are required to show probable cause under the Fourth Amendment's search warrant standard. Pen register and trap and trace orders are easier to get than full blown search warrant court orders, he added, and apparently the FBI had no probably cause. "Part of the problem here is that they're basically grabbing everything, when all they're authorized to get is the header information," Sobel says. "The other part of the problem is that apparently this system potentially compromises the privacy of all of an ISP's subscribers. " The FBI has been put under pressure to disclose the source code for it's CARNIVORE software program. 

Independent ISP technology employees of the American ISP industry want to verify that the software only monitors only suspected criminals. This is the key word, suspected, the government may accuse or suspect anyone from crimes to sending only e-mail. In America, your guilty until proven guilty. The FBI is not responding to the requests of the ISP industry because they claim if they disclose the CARNIVORE source code it would allow hackers to find ways to defeat it and disclosure may violate copyright laws of the product vendor who programmed the system. This is most interesting as the FBI own statement claims CARNIVORE is vulnerable to hacking already. Matthew Blaze of ATT says the failure of the FBI to fully disclose the source code of CARNIVORE has contributed to an attitude of mistrust and confusion, and rightfully so. The ACLU stated if the FBI disclosed the source code and let it be evaluated by the ACLU's own experts it might agree to the FBI claims that CARNIVORE is not the Big Brother threat that people claim it to be. The main concern here is if the blue prints handed over for evaluation to the ACLU are the original, real blue prints. ( Which I doubt seriously.)

The White House is urging changes in U.S. Law to make it easier for law agencies to eavesdrop on Internet communications. One example is obtain court orders easier to trace communications without even asking a judge permission in every jurisdiction the data passes through. The nations Internet Community argued they are not required under the U.S. Cable Act to overturn it's customers information without giving it's subscribers the opportunity to fight the disclosure in court. The Justice Department back peddled by saying under the Electronic Communications Act it may conduct such surveillance without telling the public nothing about it's monitoring their web activities or surfing habits and other electronic communications. CARNIVORE may be used by simply hooking up a lap top computer into the ISPs server to monitor the activity of it's members. A disclosure in September, 1999 by a North Carolina programmer noticed a notation "NSA KEY" which was hidden in Microsoft's software program which enabled The National Security Agency to monitor the computer owners activity. The main issue here is their is to much distrust in the government and rightfully so. The main goal is agreed by all that the CARNIVORE issue is for law enforcement to catch the bad guys such as terrorists, malicious hackers, and other criminal activity. Both The FBI, citizens and corporate America want the good guys to catch the bad guys. But what about the bad guys who have worked for the FBI for decades? They will be the profiteers what ever the final decision is.

July, 2000: The FBI must respond to privacy activists' request for information about the Carnivore email surveillance system. In a hearing , U.S. District Judge James Robertson ordered the FBI to promptly respond to a Freedom of Information Act request submitted by the Electronic Privacy Information Center last month. The ruling gives the FBI ten working days to tell EPIC when it can see Carnivore records under an "expedited" Freedom of Information Act procedure. EPIC sued the FBI earlier in the day, saying the agency should be forced to immediately disclose information concerning Carnivore. The suit came after EPIC asked for an expedited FOIA action from the agency but the FBI failed to respond. The judge scheduled an emergency same day hearing after the suit was filed. In an application for a temporary restraining order (available as a file download at EPIC's web site), EPIC charged that the Department of Justice and the FBI failed to expedite the FOIA request it submitted to the agencies last month. The judge's order was a moot point by the time it came, the FBI and Justice Department made a last minute concession to grant EPIC's request. At the opening of the hearing, EPIC's general counsel David Sobel told the judge he had just received the affirmative answer in a fax from the FBI and Justice Department. Assistant U.S. Attorney Lisa Barsoomian told the court the FBI planned to make the documents available "as soon as practicable." (In this case, The FBI terminology of the word practicable means it gives them more time to scheme and think of ways to bend the law.)