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On Tue, 11 Jul 2000, P.J. Ponder wrote:
> http://www.sjmercury.com/svtech/reports/gmsv/
> >From today's 'Good Morning Silicon Valley':
>
> FBI unearths sequel to Orwell's 1984: Privacy advocates are outraged over
> the FBI's deployment of a high-speed e-mail search technology called
> Carnivore which can scan massive amounts of data for e-mail messages from
> criminal suspects. Federal investigators -- who claim to have used the
> system in fewer than 100 cases since it debuted a year ago -- showed the
> technology to industry specialists in Washington a few weeks ago in the
> hopes of fostering an industry consensus on a standard for monitoring all
> digital communications. Marcus Thomas, chief of the FBI's Cyber Technology
> Section at Quantico, described Carnivore as nothing more than a "very
> specialized sniffer." Privacy advocates, predictably, see the technology
> as wide open to abuse. Said Mark Rasch, a former federal computer-crimes
> prosecutor, "It's the electronic equivalent of listening to everybody's
> phone calls to see if it's the phone call you should be monitoring."
I guess this explains the FBI's opposition to the Verio merger. I wonder
if a colocation company or service provider could be forced to disclose
its participation in the Carnivore project. Any AboveNet/Exodus customers
here want to try?
There's been speculation about NSA black boxes in such facilities for
years. The FBI, however, isn't quite as "above the law" as the NSA likes
to think it is. What would the legality of operation a random email
sniffer be? Unlike a phone system, you can't wiretap email on the network
level without violating the privacy of all the other users sharing that
switch.
Is there any old case law on wiretaps on telephone party-lines, where
uninvolved parties were monitored?
- -MW-
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