On Friday, September 14, 2001, at 10:26 AM, Harmon Seaver wrote:
In light of the apparent widespread deployment of carnivore at many, if not most, US ISP's, without, I presume, any sort of warrants, does anyone know of any proposals for lawsuits against same by EFF, ACLU, or anyone else? This would certainly be an abrogation of civil rights for all of us whose email is being intercepted without even the remotest probable cause. I would think it ripe for a class action suit. I'm assuming that ameritech knuckled under, although I've not seen any announcements of it, but last night when trying to pop mail from their server, I was getting no connection for quite awhile, then suddenly I got a message saying the "account is locked by another session or for maintenance" -- something I've never, ever seen before, although ameritech certainly has had a lot of problems with it's mail servers. Then again this morning, for over an hour, the incoming stuff just stopped. We sent several test messages from various servers, none of them arrived until much, much later. Not that I'm paranoid, I seriously doubt they'd be monitoring my mail in particular, but I would also assume that any installation of something like carnivore would cause problems with the mail at an already rather fragile entity like ameritech.
You think it unlikely they're monitoring your e-mail? How quaint. The nature of Carnivore has been to "gulp down" with a very wide mouth. I expect that those who set up the watch lists simply take all the lists they can--of Arabs, of people like us, of political activists, etc.--and merge them into a master list. Probably something like 50,000 or so names. It costs little to tag these messages. But I expect the real issue is not Carnivore, which is a fairly clumsy way of putting a box at an ISP. Ever so much easier to just sniff the networks and grab it all, then filter. Remember the hoopla about whether the NSA could sniff domestic networks? Remember that we have known for many years that the UK/USA agreement lets GCHQ sniff our networks, we sniff theirs, and an office at Fort Meade then consolidates. Also recall some informed speculation that AT&T LongLines were deliberately routed across Indian reservations specifically to skirt this issue (according to the source, reservations qualify legally as beyond the restrictions on domestic survelliance a la Minaret). And it's all pretty silly to think the Big Ears are *not* listening and sniffing. Congressvarmints have already blabbed that the NSA has been intercepting _all_ cellphone traffic and it will only be a matter of computer crunching to retrieve the cellphone calls from the passengers on the doomed flights (and from the suspected terrorists). Legal niceties about snooping and sniffing are being swept aside in this American Jihad. --Tim May