Carnivore

Carnivore is a controversial surveillance system used by the FBI to search email posts sent by identified criminal suspects during investigations. But the system—which some claim became controversial mainly for its name rather than its capabilities—has come under fire from opponents ranging from the liberal-leaning American Civil Liberties Union to staunchly conservative U.S. senators, all of whom worry that the technology could be used to spy on the public.

FBI officials have said that Carnivore is used rarely, and only after the organization has obtained a court order; in April 2001, the Associated Press reported that it had been used in investigations about 25 times. But it is a vital surveillance tool, the government says, because criminals are using the Internet to communicate and commit crimes in increasing numbers. In March 2001, for example, the FBI estimated that malevolent Russian and Ukrainian hackers had stolen more than one million credit card numbers off the Internet. Terrorist groups and organized-crime syndicates are also said to be relying on Internet technologies.

The FBI gave Carnivore its name because of its ability to get to “the meat” of what would otherwise be a gigantic amount of data passing through ISP channels, The Wall Street Journal reported. An earlier, slower version had an even hungrier name: Omnivore. But with controversy swirling around the investigative tool, the government finally was forced to change its name to something more generic: DCS1000.

Carnivore/DCS1000 consists of a personal computer equipped with an array of special surveillance software, which is installed at the network sites of various Internet service providers. It is extremely fast, scanning millions of email posts per second. The system must scan at least a portion of every email that passes through any ISP where Carnivore is installed, in order to detect whether the post might have been sent by a suspect. That aspect of Carnivore creates a massive tangle of unresolved legal and privacy issues, experts have said.

Critics charge that Carnivore creates an unprecedented opportunity for the government to snoop on innocent and unsuspecting citizens. The FBI has defended Carnivore as nothing but a high-tech, more precise version of the telephone wiretapping that the government has engaged in legally during its investigations for much of the past century. It also says that the technology is so advanced that it can be tailored to [Page 55]pluck data coming from a particular suspect's email communications from among all the traffic generated by millions of ISP customers.

Speaking at a cyber-crime discussion panel in March 2001, Orrin Kerr, a U.S. Justice Department trial attorney, accused privacy advocates of smearing the technology's potential based on pure speculation, adding that such efforts run counter to the interests of law-enforcement efforts in cyberspace, where Kerr says that criminals have gained the upper hand. He insisted that there are no documented cases of unwarranted intrusion by investigators using the technology.

The FBI has been mostly mum on the extent of Carnivore's capabilities. The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) used the Freedom of Information Act to try to force the FBI to release more than 2,000 documents detailing Carnivore, but EPIC received only 800 heavily edited documents. Even from that limited selection, EPIC stated, it learned that Carnivore, contrary to FBI assertions, is capable of capturing and archiving “unfiltered” Internet traffic.

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