At 06:21 PM 11/19/00 +0000, Jim Dixon wrote:
On Sat, 18 Nov 2000 George@orwellian.org wrote:
EPIC FOIA...
http://www.latimes.com/wires/20001117/tCB00V0387.html
WASHINGTON--The FBI's controversial e-mail surveillance tool, known as Carnivore, can retrieve all communications that go through an Internet service -far more than FBI officials have said it does -a recent test of its potential sweep found, according to bureau documents [snip]
Carnivore is an NT-based PC. How could it conceivably process all communications through even a mid-sized ISP?
There are at least two problems: processing power and network architecture.
As regards the first, our customers, many of them smaller ISPs, find it necessary to employ NT clusters to handle subsets of their traffic (Usenet news, Web proxies, and so forth). So it is difficult to believe that a single NT box could monitor their entire traffic load.
A PC, using off-the-shelf HW, is capable of filtering a full 100 Mbps link (144K packets/sec) as demonstrated by the BlackICE products http://www.networkice.com/html/blackice_sentry.html steve
As regards the second, most ISPs of any size have multiple PoPs and multiple high-speed connections to other networks. It would require incredible contortions to route all of their traffic to one point for monitoring. And for the larger network, the bandwidth into that single point would be unmanageable.
The UK government proposed building something more sophisticated than Carnivore. Consultants led them to believe that this was feasible, and costed a solution. The UK ISP associations (the LINX and ISPA) replied to their proposals by saying that (a) the proposals showed no understanding of the technical structure of the Internet and (b) their cost estimates were ridiculously low, even if the Internet could be distorted sufficiently to be monitored in the manner envisioned.
As far as we can see, the UK government as an institution is not capable of even understanding the Internet. They simply do not have enough competent technical staff. They do have a lot of relatively senior people who claim to be competent - and give bad advice, some of which finds its way into legislation and programs of action.
The overall capacity and the complexity of the Internet is increasing at an explosive rate. For better or for worse, this far exceeds the growth in any government's capability of monitoring Internet traffic.