[CTRL] Privacy groups protest FBI email scanner

[Shane A. Saylor, Eccentric Bard]

Privacy groups protest FBI email scanner
By The Associated Press
Special to CNET News.com
July 12, 2000, 5:55 a.m. PT
WASHINGTON--Civil liberties and privacy groups railed against a new system
designed to allow law enforcement agents to intercept and analyze huge
amounts of email in connection with an investigation.

The system, dubbed "Carnivore," was first hinted at April 6 in testimony to
a House subcommittee. Now the FBI has it in use.


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When Carnivore is placed with an Internet service provider, it scans all
incoming and outgoing emails for messages associated with the target of a
criminal probe.

In a letter addressed to two members of the House subcommittee that deals
with Fourth Amendment search-and-seizure issues, the American Civil
Liberties Union (ACLU) argued that the system breaches the ISP's rights and
the rights of all its customers by reading both sender and recipient
addresses, as well as subject lines of emails, to decide whether to make a
copy of the entire message.

Further, while the system is plugged into the ISP's systems, it is
controlled solely by the law enforcement agency. In a traditional wiretap,
the tap is physically placed and maintained by the telephone company.

"Carnivore is roughly equivalent to a wiretap capable of accessing the
contents of the conversations of all of the phone company's customers, with
the 'assurance' that the FBI will record only conversations of the specified
target," read the letter. "This 'trust us, we are the government' approach
is the antithesis of the procedures required under our wiretapping laws."

Barry Steinhardt, associate director of the ACLU, said citizens shouldn't
trust that such a sweeping data tap will only be used against criminal
suspects. And even then, he said, the data mined by Carnivore, particularly
subject lines, is intrusive.

"Law enforcement should be prohibited from installing any device that allows
them to intercept communications from persons other than the target,"
Steinhardt said in an interview. "When conducting these kinds of
investigations, the information should be restricted to only addressing
information."

A representative for Rep. Charles T. Canady (R-Fla.), who heads the
Constitution subcommittee, said the congressman had no immediate comment on
the letter.

In testimony to Canady's subcommittee, Robert Corn-Revere, a lawyer at the
law firm of Hogan & Hartson here, said he represented an ISP that refused to
install the Carnivore system. He said the provider was placed in an "awkward
position" because the company feared suits from customers unhappy with the
government looking into all its email.

"It was acknowledged (by the government) that Carnivore would enable remote
access to the ISP's network and would be under the exclusive control of
government agents," Corn-Revere added.

He told the committee that current law is insufficient to deal with
Carnivore's potential and that the ISP lost its court battle partly because
telephone laws are stretched to cover the Internet.

Corn-Revere would not reveal the name of his client, which lost the case. He
said the FBI has been using Carnivore since early this year.

James X. Dempsey, senior staff counsel at the Center for Democracy and
Technology, said the main problem with Carnivore is its mystery.

"The FBI is placing a black box inside the computer network of an ISP,"
Dempsey said. "Not even the ISP knows exactly what that gizmo is doing."

But Dempsey said that ISPs contributed to the problem by saying current
technology does not allow them to sort out exactly what the government is
entitled to get under a search warrant. The carriers complained that they
had to give everything to the FBI.

"The service providers said they didn't know how to comply with court
orders," Dempsey said. "By taking that position, they have hurt themselves,
putting themselves into a box."

Marcus Thomas, who heads the FBI's Cyber Technology Section, told The Wall
Street Journal that the bureau has about 20 Carnivore systems, which are PCs
with proprietary software. He said Carnivore meets current wiretapping laws
but is designed to keep up with the Internet.

"This is just a specialized sniffer," Thomas told the Journal, which first
reported details about Carnivore.

Encrypted email, done with an email-encoding program such as PGP (Pretty
Good Privacy), still stays in code on Carnivore, and it's up to agents to
decode it.

Dempsey has a possible solution to the problem, though one that's probably
unlikely: Show everyone what it does and how it does it, allowing ISPs to
install the software themselves.

"The FBI should make this gizmo an open-source product," he said. "Then the
secret is gone."

Copyright © 2000 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may
not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

--
Everything on this earth has a purpose, and every disease an herb to
cure it, and every person a mission. This is the Indian theory of
existence. --Mourning Dove, 1888-1936
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