Originally labeled "Part 1". Since Quandry left DarkConspiracy.com before finishing "Part 2", we are without this article's completion.

Originally posted November, 2000

Carnivore: America's Digital Stasi

“U.S Citizens may soon have to choose between civil liberties and more intrusive forms of protection...”
- Secretary of Defense Cohen
Army Times, September 22, 1997

The words of Secretary Cohen are quite revealing in that they express the willingness of the power elite to frame important issues in an either/or context. We are forced into believing that a citizen cannot have one without the other. The internet is the latest battleground in this conflict of ideas.

Carnivore, AG Janet Reno's ‘wonderful tool’, is the FBI's latest attempt at domestic spying. This software was developed at the FBI's Engineering Research Facility in Quantico, uses Microsoft Windows NT as its operating system and is deployed on-site by an FBI Special Agent at an ISP such as Earthlink. As in the case of Earthlink, a laptop computer is connected to the ISP server. The software then reads the header of every email which passes through the server, snooping through these communications at the rate of millions of headers per second. It does not discriminate between innocent emails and those of a suspect.

Civil libertarians call these actions wiretaps. As such they fall into a virtual chaos of legal interpretation which can be found in Title 18 of the U.S. Code (Sections 2510-2520) and Title III of the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1986.

The ‘Wiretap Report’, which is published by the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, concludes in its 1999 report that for each Title III wiretap, 1,608 innocent communications are intercepted. The implications are enormous. This translates into over 2,000,000 innocent communications monitored in 1998 alone.

In testimony before the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on the Constitution it was revealed that the name Carnivore was selected because ‘it finds the meat’.

FBI Assistant Director Donald Kerr, who also oversees the FBI's Laboratory Division, told Congress, ”It does not search through the contents of every message and collect those that contain key words like ‘bomb’ or ‘drugs’. It selects messages based on criteria expressly set out in the court order, for example, messages transmitted to or from a particular account or to or from a particular user.” The NSA use this exact dragnet search in its Echelon program and forces one to wonder about the relationship between the NSA and the FBI.

Earthlink is one ISP which has been used by Carnivore. This news broke on April 6th when Earthlink's attorney Robert Corn-Revere testified before the Committee on the Constitution. A ‘trap and trace’ order was forced upon Earthlink by the FBI. A ‘trap and trace’ order does not allow the government to intercept the CONTENT of phone conversations. And that is the bottom line here. Does the header of an email contain CONTENT?

Next Time: Part II; The Caging of Carnivore The ACLU and the Electronic Privacy Information Center's efforts at sushing the source codes for Carnivore, Etherpeek and Omnivore.