Grex Agora41 Conference

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Grex Agora41 Item 214: Carnivore -- not a picky eater
Entered by gull on Wed May 29 13:34:31 UTC 2002:

EPIC has an interesting FBI memo, dated April 5, 2000:
http://www.epic.org/privacy/carnivore/fisa.html

It's about a failure of the FBI's 'Carnivore' email interception software. 
Apparently it hasn't been as reliable or selective as we were lead to
believe.  Excerpt:

"The software was turned on and did not work correctly.  The FBI software
not only picked up the E-Mails under the electronic surveillance of the
FBI's target, (censored), but also picked up E-Mails on non-covered targets. 
The FBI technical person was apparently so upset that he _destroyed_ all the
E-Mail take, including the take on (censored).  (Censored) is under the
impression that no one from the FBI (censored) was present to supervise the
FBI technical person at the time.  Now the FBI people want to run a new
software experiment at the carrier to see if it works."

"(Censored) states that OIPR [Office of Intelligence Policy and Review] was
never told that the FBI software was experimental.  OIPR was informed that
it would work.  The FBI technical people are still trying to make it work in
(censored) and want to resume the electronic surveillance.  The FBI people
in (censored) also want a physical search warrant to pick up the E-Mails
from the carrier, which the FBI picked up on the target, but destroyed."


The Register has a (probably overly strident) take on the memo here:
http://www.theregus.com/content/6/25083.html

6 responses total.

#1 of 6 by oval on Wed May 29 14:58:32 2002:

"Now they're led by a neo-Cromwellian sour-puss with the requisite disapproval
of drinking, music and dancing, along with a pronounced loathing of women's
breasts both real and artistically represented and an uncanny fondness for
firearms, whose only known distinction is having lost his Senate seat to a
dead man."

hahaha!!!

#2 of 6 by bdh3 on Thu May 30 04:10:06 2002:

Isn't Carnival or whatever they are calling it a Windozed based
product?

#3 of 6 by gull on Thu May 30 13:13:18 2002:

I think so. One of the documents EPIC has mentions that Omnivore started out
on Solaris x86 but was ported to Windows NT for better compatibility with
portable computers.

#4 of 6 by vmskid on Thu May 30 18:55:16 2002:

Perhaps we don't have much to worry about then . . .

#5 of 6 by bdh3 on Fri May 31 05:11:12 2002:

My point, and explains why it doesn't work very well.

#6 of 6 by jared on Tue Jun 4 15:22:07 2002:

yay apple.

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