As a simple minded observer far removed from inside DC politics,
I can't help wonder if the real purpose of disclosing the existance of
Carnivore was not based on the nieve assumption that Congress and public
would gladly accept such a trunk wiretap device as necessary and
proper, but rather a calculated gambit to get Congress to extend the
existing CALEA statutes to cover Internet wiretaps the same way they
now cover voice calls. Such a move would seem to many to be a reasonable
compromise between the "give us everything and trust us to only take
what we are allowed to" of Carnivore and the current situation where ISPs
are not clearly required to provide any mechanisms for filtering out a
particular target's traffic for LEAs at all.
Currently as I understand it, the CALEA requirement for
mandatory wiretap support does not extend to providers of "information
services", which has been widely construed to include most ISPs - so
there is no way to force an ISP to implement wiretappablity in its
infrastructure or provide any mechanism by which law enforcement can
secretly obtain real time net traffic (email) from a particular customer
of an ISP. And all the other legal strictures to support this are not
in place for ISPs either.
Proposing something far more comprehensive than what you really
expect to get and then reluctantly settling for what you really thought
was necessary is an old strategy. And if the FBI started out by asking for
CALEA type individual subscriber mandatory wiretap capability provided
by ISPs likely many of the same civil liberties types would be objecting
to that almost as loudly.
Just a thought...
--
Dave Emery N1PRE, [EMAIL PROTECTED] DIE Consulting, Weston, Mass.
PGP fingerprint = 2047/4D7B08D1 DE 6E E1 CC 1F 1D 96 E2 5D 27 BD B0 24 88 C3 18
