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Carnivore { July 21 2000 } FBI Web Monitoring Debated
By John Schwartz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, July 21, 2000; 1:02 PM
Federal Bureau of Investigation officials today gave the news media a look at "Carnivore," the controversial new system it uses to wiretap the Internet.
Carnivore looks like just about any system that Internet Service Providers use to monitor activity of their networks. The modified "packet sniffer" program sifts through the stream of data from an Internet Service Provider (ISP) to find the senders and recipients of the suspect's e-mail.
FBI officials will testify Monday about Carnivore at a hearing of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution chaired by Rep. Charles Canady (R-Fla.).
The officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, argued that the recent controversy surrounding the technology focuses on a misunderstanding about how it is used. Although the rack-mounted computer that runs the Carnivore program can sample the data stream running through an ISP, it only records those "packets" – the bundles of information that computers break communications into for shuttling around the Internet – that are identified as e-mail to and from the suspect.
The fruits of conventional surveillance have to undergo "minimization," so that investigators do not receive information that they are not entitled to. "We believe this is better minimization than we do with headphones on a telephone tap," one official said, because so much of the extra information is excluded before human eyes get to see it.
The technology has become necessary, the officials said, because some smaller ISP's do not have the capability to provide the data that law enforcement needs quickly. And even though grabbing standard electronic mail is relatively simple, newer methods of sending and receiving messages, including Web-based mail services like Hotmail and Yahoo mail, present challenges that Carnivore can meet.
The system has come under heated attack from Republican leadership in Congress. "Nobody can dispute the fact that this is not legal . . . within the context of any current wiretap law," said House Majority Leader Richard K. Armey (R-Tex.).
Civil liberties groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union have attacked Carnivore on many grounds. In a July 11 letter to Canady, ACLU officials wrote that "the Carnivore system gives law enforcement e-mail interception capabilities that were never contemplated" in the key e-mail wiretap statute, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act. Carnivore, the ACLU wrote, "raises new legal issues that cry out for congressional attention if we are to preserve Fourth Amendment rights in the digital age."
Carnivore's opponents have argued that the technology, once it is attached to the an ISP's network, could tap all messages – from the suspect and anyone else in the data stream. The ACLU called for the FBI to do away with much of the secrecy that shrouds the program and how it works by releasing the "source code," or original software, that runs it; the groups say that only then can the groups feel that the software does what the FBI says it does. One of the FBI officials said that wouldn't happen, in part because some of the software used is owned by private companies, and also because "people might go to work on how to beat the system – we're not interested in getting into that race."
The officials stressed that full wiretaps can only be used after a valid court order, and that even the limited amount of data that the FBI seeks with Carnivore requires a degree of judicial review and a statment by law enforcement that the information is relevant to an ongoing investigation. Abuse of wiretap authority, the official noted, is subject to criminal and civil penalties, and "none of us wants to be part of a conpiracy to misuse these capabilities – this is our job, and not the way we want to leave the FBI."
The officials did say, however, that they planned to present the software for examination by a third party, perhaps academic computer science experts, who could judge the system independently.
© 2000 The Washington Post Company
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