FBI Says Carnivore Will Not Devour Privacy
CNN News
July 21, 2000
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- FBI officials will go to Capitol Hill on
Monday to try to ease public fears that the agency's new
Internet surveillance system, dubbed "Carnivore," is a
threat to people's privacy.
As part of its effort to soften the system's image, the FBI
on Friday put Carnivore, stored in a simple laptop, on
display for the media and spent nearly two hours answering
reporters' questions.
The FBI maintains Carnivore, which it can use only after
getting a court order, is the equivalent of a telephone
wiretap. And the agency said the e-mail monitoring system is
less intrusive because it can eliminate large volumes of
data from categories of electronic traffic irrelevant to the
investigation.
Fears of a Big Brother on the Internet
But privacy advocates worry Carnivore is actually Big
Brother on the Internet and has great potential for abuse.
"The FBI's position is essentially, 'Trust us, we're the
government,'" said Barry Steinhardt of the American Civil
Liberties Union. "But we have a long history of the FBI
abusing its authority."
Jim Dempsey of the Center for Democracy and Technology also
questions how the information gathered will be used.
"Are the communications of innocent people being swept into
a net? " said Dempsey. "And I think people also have to
worry about what are the underlying legal standards for
using something like Carnivore."
FBI officials may face similar questions from lawmakers
Monday.
"I'm not convinced that they are doing anything
inappropriate," said Rep. Charles Canady, R-Florida,
chairman of the Constitution subcommittee of the House
Judiciary Committee. "The purpose of this hearing is to
examine all sides of this to make certain that this is being
handled in a way that is legal and Constitutional."
How Carnivore finds what it's looking for
According to the FBI, Carnivore works much like a "sniffer,"
a program that has been around for some time and is designed
to monitor and analyze network traffic so as to help network
administrators eliminate such problems as bottlenecks.
But the FBI system has the unique additional ability to
detect certain communications such as e-mails while ignoring
others such as online shopping orders.
According to officials at the FBI, Carnivore will only scan
the identifying addresses in the 'to' and 'from' fields but
not the content of electronics messages. They liken it to
looking at the front of an envelope.
Before Carnivore can be used in a case, the FBI must go
through several high-level judiciary approvals, and inform
the relevant Internet service provider of its actions.
FBI officials believe critics will be less fearful once they
know more about Carnivore, which has been used in about 25
investigations in the last year, including criminal cases
and "national security" cases involving counter-intelligence
or counter-terrorism.
Media informs Reno that Carnivore was unleashed
The FBI said it has briefed several governmental agencies
and Internet Service Providers. But the agency admits it has
failed to adequately anticipate concerns from privacy
groups, private citizens and even key administration
officials.
Attorney General Janet Reno said while she had been informed
that Carnivore was in development, she learned from a
newspaper article that the system had already been deployed
in actual investigations.
FBI sources told CNN that Reno was briefed on the system by
FBI Director Louis Freeh on Thursday.
Reno is one of several officials who have publicly
criticized the FBI's choice of names for the new system.
The agency decided to name it Carnivore because, as one
official put it, the system "get(s) to the meat" of an
investigation. But one top FBI official said the name had
been intended only for internal use and conceded that
criticism of the name had been "somewhat sobering."
"We'll think further about that in the future," he said.
CNN Justice Department Correspondent Pierre Thomas and CNN
Producer Terry Frieden and CNN.com Technology Editor Daniel
Sieberg contributed to this report.