Wow, this was a good report... Interesting idea to ponder for sure.
-----Original Message-----
From: J Taylor [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Wednesday, October 18, 2000 12:08 AM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: [CTRL] shutting the internet down
-Caveat Lector-
>
> http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20000713.html
>
> Meet Eater
> The FBI's Plan for Digital Wiretaps Raises More Questions Than
> It Answers
>
> By Robert X. Cringely
>
> There is this moment toward the otherwise forgettable end of
> "Star Trek V: The Final Frontier" when this alien creature
> patterned after the Wizard of Oz has even Spock convinced that
> it is God with a capital "G." They are just about to fire-up
> the Enterprise and take "God" back to Earth when Kirk --
> probably hoping to avoid the military protocol involved with
> having a deity on the bridge -- asks a pivotal question: Why
> would God need a starship? Couldn't God just blink and
> instantly be in Times Square looking up at the NASDAQ sign,
> wondering why they cut windows into a video screen?
>
> This scene of the skeptical Kirk flashed in my mind this week
> as I read about Carnivore, the FBI's system for reading the
> e-mail of bad guys. Carnivore is a sealed box that is
> installed at the network operations center of an Internet
> Service Provider. It filters packets, finds e-mail going to
> and from identified criminals, and saves that e-mail for later
> decryption and analysis. What bothers the Internet Service
> Providers is they have no control over the Carnivore box, and
> no way of protecting the privacy of all the customers who
> aren't drug lords or escaped felons. What bothers the American
> Civil Liberties Union is the likelihood that individuals will
> not only lose their right to privacy, but lose it in a new and
> insidious way.
>
> What bothers me is the damned box. Why would the FBI need a
> box? Here's all the FBI will say about Carnivore. It sits on
> the network at the ISP, is PC-based, is "a kind of a sniffer,"
> identifies and saves packets associated with suspected
> criminals, is installed under a court order, and doesn't
> itself act as a decryption device. There are supposed to be
> around 20 Carnivore boxes, and they have been in use since
> early this year. You don't need a sealed box to do any of
> these tasks, most of which are already being done for
> completely legal reasons right inside the router at every ISP.
> Routers look at every packet, determine what type of packet it
> is, where it is coming from and where it is going to, then the
> router delivers the packet to its intended destination. This
> is what routers do. Adding the Carnivore task is a simple
> matter of blind copying every packet to or from a bad guy to a
> third address at the J. Edgar Hoover FBI Building in
> Washington, DC. It's at most a few lines of code and requires
> no additional hardware.
>
> So why the box?
>
> The probable reason is because cops like to be in control.
> They LIKE boxes, like delivering them in unmarked cars, like
> the satisfying click of the RJ-45 connector as it slides home.
> Maybe they don't know that it could all be done without a box.
> Heck, it IS being done without a box all the time, and that's
> where the ACLU is missing the point. Sniffers have been
> running on networks ever since Harry Saal invented the device.
> Every packet at every ISP already goes through a sniffer at
> least part of the time. An ISP could do at any time what we
> fear the FBI might do with Carnivore read the e-mail and
> follow the surfing habits of every pretty blonde customer.
> Good ISPs, which is to say nearly all ISPs don't do this, of
> course, but it happens.
>
> So why doesn't the FBI just get a court order making the ISP
> do the dirty work? That's what the ISPs wonder, too,
> especially since that's how phone taps are handled. Cops don't
> really climb poles and attach alligator clips to hear phone
> calls. That's all done at the central office by telephone
> company technicians.
>
> The FBI, through the use of Carnivore, is trying to grab a
> little more power. And by doing it themselves with Carnivore,
> the FBI doesn't have to reveal the identity of the bad guy or
> extent to which it is using the box. Yeah, right.
>
> But wait, it gets worse. There are aspects of this case that
> the ACLU hasn't even considered. The Carnivore boxes are
> what's called "co-located" at the ISP. This isn't a rare
> thing. Many organizations like to control their own Web or
> mail servers and so co-locate them at an ISP. Colocation puts
> your server closer to the Internet backbone, eliminates
> typical T-1 line costs, allows the ISP to monitor and reboot
> the server, and usually comes with nifty things like redundant
> backbone connections and diesel generators in case the power
> goes out. Companies in the co-location business include
> well-known names like AT&T, IBM, and Intel. So there are tens
> of thousands -- maybe hundreds of thousands -- of computers
> already installed just like the FBI installs its Carnivore
> boxes. What keeps those co-located computers from being
> sniffers, too? Nothing at all. For $300 per month, you too
> could install your own Carnivore box at the ISP of your
> choice. Co-location facilities don't really care what you do
> with your co-located server as long as you keep paying the
> bill.
>
> More technically astute readers may take exception to this
> idea of private Carnivore boxes since there are ways to
> isolate ISP traffic and keep one box from seeing all the
> packets on the ISP network. But at most ISPs, THOSE TECHNIQUES
> AREN'T USED.
>
> This still leaves us wondering why the FBI insists on this
> program that isn't really necessary to do what they say they
> want to do. Beyond my overzealous cop theory, the most obvious
> possibility is that Carnivore is actually intended to do
> something else, some different task than the FBI is saying.
> Privacy advocates and the ACLU seem fixated on the idea that
> the Feds will use Carnivore to eavesdrop on non-criminals. It
> makes sense to worry about this, given past FBI anti-privacy
> campaigns like the Clipper Chip fiasco of several years ago
> that was supposed to have made it possible for the FBI to tap
> up to 10 million simultaneous telephone conversations, even
> though there are only an average of 1500 court-ordered phone
> taps each year in the U.S.
>
> But I have my own theory about Carnivore. From a network
> architecture standpoint, the best location for Carnivore is
> right after the ISP's router. This puts Carnivore in the path
> of every packet entering or leaving the ISP. It's also a major
> reason why ISPs might not want to install Carnivore boxes --
> it's the network's point of greatest vulnerability. In this
> position, Carnivore can act as a listening and recording
> device, OR IT CAN ACT AS A SWITCH. If we ever hear a proposal
> from the FBI in which it plans to install Carnivores at all
> 6000 ISPs in the U.S., we'll be giving the government the
> power to do something it can't do right now.
>
> Shut the Internet down.
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