CDR: Re: Carnivore All-Consuming

[Jim Dixon]

On Sat, 18 Nov 2000 George at 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.

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.

--
Jim Dixon                  VBCnet GB Ltd           http://www.vbc.net
tel +44 117 929 1316                             fax +44 117 927 2015