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What is Carnivore?

Protect Your Online Privacy!

In July 2000 we first began hearing ominous warnings about an FBI computer surveillance system codenamed "Carnivore." According to the FBI, Carnivore is a specialized computer that plugs into a communications hub in a "passive" listening mode. Its specialized eavesdropping software filters all material passing through it and automatically saves anything flagged by the filters onto a Jaz drive for later access by FBI agents. The name "Carnivore" comes from the FBI's belief that this system gets to the "meat" of any communications it deems "suspicious" or "interesting".

The FBI claims to have about twenty Carnivore computers available for Internet monitoring and can use them once it receives a court order to begin surveillance.

Because Carnivore can filter pretty much anything that passes through the communications hub into which it's plugged, this is hardly a reassuring technology for anyone concerned with privacy. In fact:

"It's the electronic equivalent of listening to everybody's phone calls to see if it's the phone call you should be monitoring. You develop a tremendous amount of information," Mark Rasch, a former federal prosecutor, told the Wall Street Journal.

And federal representative Bob Barr (R-Ga.), a conservative privacy advocate, said, "If there's one word I would use to describe this, it would be 'frightening.'"

Carnivore is essentially a portable electronic fishing boat. The FBI could use just about any pretext imaginable (e.g. child pornography, hate groups, terrorism, money laundering) to install a Carnivore system somewhere on the Internet. And once it's there, it's allowed to find whatever it wants, much like Big Brother's all-seeing wall-cameras in George Orwell's "1984".

It's unlikely that the FBI could get away with installing such a broad-based listening post on a major telephone exchange system, but it seems that the Internet is fair game. This is probably because the mainstream media has mounted a successful propaganda campaign that has painted the Internet as being comprised of equal parts pornography, hate groups, stock scams, and celebrity gossip in the minds of the great unwashed masses. People who would never stand for having their phones tapped for no apparent reason might accept a wiretap on the Internet, especially if they go online infrequently or not at all.

The ACLU is urging Congress to amend electronic privacy laws that would prohibit Carnivore and similar "dragnet" systems, and is also taking the unusual step of requesting the software's source code under the Freedom of Information Act. As a side note, even Janet Reno will make one of her token investigations (probably largely for the sake of appearances).

But it will take a long time for Congress to act, and even if they are successful at "officially" stopping the FBI from reading your email, governments are not known for their ethics when law-breaking is concerned. Rest assured that a Carnivore equivalent will always exist somewhere.

Some critics would contend that the Echelon spy system already comprises such a network. For those who don't know, Echelon is a global spying network based in Menwith Hall Station, England and created by the USA, UK, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. It scans not only all international communication lines (using 120 satellites, microwave listening stations, and an adapted submarine) but also analyses and stores Usenet messages as well.

Now before you decide you can't afford to ever use email or post to a newsgroup again for fear of compromising your privacy, think again. Some powerful tools are available that will stop Carnivore and even Echelon in its tracks.

The best way to keep your private emails private is to use encryption. How effective can it be, if you do it right? The Director of the FBI has stated that: "... encryption ... has catastrophic implications for our ability to combat every threat to national security ... the widespread use of robust non-recovery encryption will ultimately devastate our ability to fight crime and terrorism." Edit out the self-serving doomsday rhetoric, and you have a pretty powerful endorsement for the effectiveness of encryption.

Probably the most well-known and most-used email encryption program available to the public is PGP, which rather whimsically stands for "Pretty Good Privacy". Originally developed by Phil Zimmermann, PGP is the standard for email encryption on the Internet and enables you to encrypt your emails so that only the intended recipient can decrypt and read them.

You can get a lot of useful information at the PGP website itself (see http://www.pgpi.com) including a copy of the program for non-commercial use and a well-written user's manual.


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