Carnivore Early Deployment

[Tim May]

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