CDR: More on Carnivore

[George at Orwellian.Org]

http://foxnews.com/national/101300/carnivoretwo_riley.sml

FBI's Carnivore Just the First Step In Cyber Surveillance
Monday, October 16, 2000
By Patrick Riley

The FBI says its controversial Carnivore system is just "the tip of 
the iceberg" when it comes to Internet surveillance because an even 
sharper-toothed information chomper is now in development.

Amid all the hubbub over whether the current system violates privacy 
rights, the agency has been quietly working on both "Carnivore 2.0" 
and "Carnivore 3.0," according to FBI documents released this month 
under a Freedom of Information Act claim filed by the Electronic Privacy 
Information Center. The current Carnivore is version 1.3.4, according 
to the documents.

An "Enhanced Carnivore" program has been under development since last 
November - under a $650,000 contract scheduled to end in January 2001. 
Most of the details on the souped-up snoopers were blacked out in heavy 
black marker before the papers were released.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation makes no bones about its plans 
for the system, which sifts an Internet Service Provider's transmissions 
to track suspects' online activity.

"As it looks today, it could be completely different a year from now," 
said FBI spokesman Paul Bresson. "Really, we've only seen the tip of 
the iceberg in terms of the change in technology."

He said improving Carnivore is vital for keeping pace with criminal 
elements.

"This is going to continue to be a cat-and-mouse game," he said. 
"There's always going to be software and other encryption technology 
that render a system less useful."

He declined to give specific details. But privacy experts say an 
evolving Carnivore presents a problem for those trying to keep an eye 
on it.

"It's a moving target," said David Banisar, a senior fellow at EPIC. 
"It means there needs to be continual oversight, not just onetime 
oversight. It means that if we get the source code we'll have to get 
the source code as it changes also, and do a re-analysis as the 
functions of the software change."

The program's source code, the piece of information most sought after 
by activists trying to figure out if Carnivore reads the e-mail of 
more than just those targeted by a court order, was omitted from the 
600-plus pages given to EPIC in the first of several planned releases. 
But the organization has vowed to continue fighting for it.

Despite the incomplete technical blueprint, the newly public papers 
do shed some light on what sequels to Carnivore might look like.

Three jargon-heavy lines of text that survived the FBI censor reveal 
that Version 2.0 will be capable of "built-in data analysis that 
Carnivore doesn't appear to do now," Banisar said.

That means being able to display captured Internet data as soon as 
Carnivore intercepts it. The current system merely stores the data 
and two other programs - "Packeteer" and "Coolminer" - must be used 
to process and display it.

No information was released from the Version 3.0 section but research 
mentioned elsewhere in the unclassified papers involves an aspect of 
the technology dubbed "Dragon Net" that captures telephone conversations 
held via the Web - a process known as "voice over IP" technology.

Banisar suspects the FBI might also want its future sniffers to have 
the ability to track multiple targets simultaneously. That wouldn't 
bode well, he said. "The more capability it has to intercept more than 
one target, the more likely it is to be abused."

While the current Carnivore is purely monogamous, it casts a wider 
net than commonly thought, according to an analysis of the FBI documents 
by anti-computer crime site SecurityFocus.com.

Carnivore can "be programmed to watch for all the Internet activities 
of a particular person," said Kevin Poulson, editorial director at 
SecurityFocus and a former hacker. The system can even reconstruct 
Web pages viewed by a suspect. "All that's been talked about is its 
ability to monitor e-mail."

In light of this, said EPIC's Banisar: "It makes you wonder what else 
they could possibly want."