with permission from NewsMax.com
7-12-00
The Feds Can Read Your E-Mail
First it was
Echelon the global
eavesdropping system
Uncle Sam and
John Bull have been using to spy on satellite-transmitted
phone calls,
e-mails and
fax messages. Now it's
Carnivore, the
FBI's newest
electronic snooping device that can read your e-mail right off your
mail
server.
Capable of scanning millions of e-mails a second,
Carnivore can easily
be used to monitor
everybody's e-mail messages and transactions,
including banking and
Internet commerce. If they want to,
the feds can
find out what
books you're buying online, what kind of banking
transactions you conduct - in short,
everything you do when you go
online and send e-mail, whether private or commercial.
The FBI has been quietly monitoring e-mail for about a year. Two
weeks ago the feds went public and explained the
high-tech snooping
operation to what the
Wall Street Journal called "a roomful of
astonished industry specialists."
According to the bureau, they've used Carnivore - so called because it
can digest the "
meat" of the information they're looking for - in less
than 100 cases, in most cases to locate
hackers but also to track
terrorist
and
narcotics activities.
But there is nothing to stop Carnivore from making a meal of your
e-mail messages and transactions if they decide that's what they want to
do and can get a judge to issue a
court order allowing them to tap your
e-mail as they would your phones.
That's
scant comfort considering the
underhanded means the feds
employed to get court orders to raid the
Branch Davidian compound, or
to win a
judge's permission to stage what amounted to an illegal armed
raid on
Elian Gonzalez's Miami home.
Carnivore is nothing but a store-bought
personal computer with special
software that the FBI installs in the offices of
Internet service providers
(
ISPs).
The computer is kept in a locked cage for about a month and a half.
Every day an agent comes by and retrieves the previous day's e-mail
sent to or by someone suspected of a crime.
But critics say that Carnivore, like some ravening beast, is simply too
hungry to be trusted - that it gives the feds far too much access to too
much private information.
"This is more of a vacuum cleaner-type approach -
it apparently rifles
through everything," David Sobel, general counsel for the
Electronic
Privacy Information Center, told Fox News.
"It's potentially much more
invasive than telephone surveillance."
Carnivore could conceivably monitor all the e-mail that moves through
an ISP - not merely messages sent to or from the subject allegedly being
monitored. Critics compare it to eavesdropping on all the phones in a
neighborhood simply to
zero in on just one phone.
Disturbingly, the FBI has prevailed in challenges against forcing ISPs to
allow Carnivore to be installed in their offices. According to the
Wall
Street Journal,
one unidentified ISP put up a legal fight against
Carnivore early this year and lost.
The FBI defends Carnivore, insisting it is used selectively and monitors
only the e-mail of the subject. They say that messages belonging to those
not being probed, even if criminal, would not be admissible in court.
"The volume of e-mail in a location is generally fairly small and being
managed by a small number of e-mail servers on a fairly low-speed
network," said Marcus Thomas, chief of the FBI's
cyber technology
section.
"The system is not unlike '
sniffers' used within the networks every day."
That fails to satisfy critics such as Sobel. He says Carnivore is similar to
Russia's surveillance system, called "
SORM," which all Russian ISPs are
forced to install to allow the government to spy on whomever it
chooses.
Itís also similar, he says, to the notorious
Echelon the
National Security
Agency's global eavesdropping system, which intercepts
telecommunications transmissions from around the world and looks for
keywords that could indicate
illegal activity.
"Carnivore is really the latest indication of a very aggressive stance that
the bureau is taking in collecting
as much information as technically
possible," Sobel said.
FBI spokesman Paul Bresson insists that law-abiding citizens have
nothing to fear from Carnivore. "Anytime we develop a system, we're
basically balancing the interests of national security against that of the
privacy of the public," he said.
"This issue's always going to come up. We're always going to get
questions. We understand that."