from: http://www.aci.net/kalliste/ Click Here: <A HREF="http://www.aci.net/kalliste/">The Home Page of J. Orlin Grabbe</A> ----- Nice Kitty Big Schools Nix Carnivore Evaulation US wants rubber stamp: Carnivore Good! Five groups of researchers have bowed out of the competition to evaluate the so-called Carnivore Internet surveillance system. And that likely will dash Justice Department hopes that a major university would validate its controversial eavesdropping device, participants said Tuesday. Attorney General Janet Reno seemed confident Aug. 10 that one of several then-unnamed schools would take up the challenge of verifying that Carnivore, when properly used, would not violate the civil rights of individuals subject to its workings. But rules for the review published Aug. 24 have encountered stiff opposition from researchers approached for the job by the Justice Department. The Department, they say now, is effectively asking for a meaningless examination of a device whose potential for abuse may well outstrip its usefulness. "This is not a request for an independent report," says Jeffrey Schiller, a computer network manager at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who was asked to work on the review. "They want a rubber stamp." "I don't know of any university interested in this review," says Thomas Perrine, a computer researcher at the San Diego Supercomputing Center at the University of California at San Diego. "If there are any others out there we haven't been able to find them." Assistant Attorney General Stephen Colgate said the Justice Department was taking a wait-and-see approach. "The deadline is 5 p.m. (Wednesday)," he said. "You don't know until you see what kind of response you get." In any case, he said, federal law forbids him from talking about bidders until proposals are in. The controversy surrounding the Carnivore audit springs from several issues. Among other things, the Justice Department says: Universities and any other contractors must agree not to publish anything the government deems sensitive. Researchers may examine only those matters the government wants examined. Teams must agree to clear all personnel working on the evaluation with the government. Would-be evaluators complain those restrictions are excessive, but Colgate says they have to be there. "What I don't want to see is a road map of the source code that could give the bad guys the ability to thwart this," he says. "If evaluators say there are security deficiencies that need to be addressed, that's precisely what we want them to address." Researchers counter that an open review that all experts can examine will likely yield more bug repairs and improvements than problems. Adds James Dempsey, senior staff counsel to the Center for Democracy and Technology: "Some people might learn how to evade it. But that's the price of the assurance that this thing isn't some vacuum cleaner they're going to use to grab everything." MIT, Purdue University, Dartmouth College, the University of Michigan and the Supercomputing Center at the University of California at San Diego have all turned down overtures from the Justice Department or signaled their unwillingness to participate in advance, researchers said. Their decision not to examine the device will likely be a topic of discussion at Senate and House hearings on Carnivore Wednesday morning. Researchers say even a cursory examination of known facts about Carnivore worries them. And that is what makes the choice of who does the review so important. Unlike a recorded human voice, which can be easily shown to be authentic or fake, there is no built-in authentication process for e-mail. PC clocks can be changed to produce fraudulent time stamps, text messages can be altered undetectably and others fabricated or deleted entirely. A "black box" placed at an Internet service provider and open only to FBI agents produces more problems than many experts are comfortable with. Given all those things, researchers interviewed for this article say that procedures FBI agents follow with Carnivore must be central to any good review. "There are a lot of different skills necessary in doing this review," says Steve Bellovin, an AT&T researcher who helped put together a review team for the San Diego Supercomputing Center. "The totality of how it's used, it's all the other surrounding systems that surround this thing that lead to other risks." Furthermore, AT&T's Bellovin warns, getting all the e-mail traffic on a suspect is exceedingly hard. E-mail can take strange hops and not land at the place police expect it to, harming a prosecution as easily as a defense. "I do not think it's possible to do a perfect job," Bellovin says. "One of the important things to do is understand its limitations. If the FBI is investigating someone they don't want to mislead someone." Justice's Colgate counters that the FBI already has laws it must follow to intercept e-mail. "What we don't want is a debate over the government's inherent authority to conduct electronic surveillance. If researchers find there are issues that have to be addressed, we can do that," he says. The San Diego Supercomputer Center's Perrine says few lawyers can take on a body of e-mail that incriminates a defendant. That much is apparent, he says, from the fact that virtually no hacking cases ever go to trial. "If you have bad digital evidence you don't go to trial because there isn't a U.S. attorney who will take it. If you have great digital evidence, you'll never go to trial because the suspect will plead out." 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