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Judge Orders FBI to Provide Details on Carnivore By Dan Calloway, TheWorldJournal.com 
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Last week a Federal Judge ordered the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to provide details it has on the surveillance it has been conducting on Americans' email through its email surveillance system. A private advocacy group had petitioned the Federal courts to crack down on what appears to be an unconstitutional practice by its own agency. Privacy advocates at the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) had asked the Federal Judge to place a temporary restraining order on Carnivore until it can be studied and until the public has an opportunity to review just exactly what the intentions of the FBI are in this regard. Carnivore is the code-name for the FBI's latest email surveillance on the private sector and public in general. Similar to wire tapping, Carnivore intercepts email using a super computer at FBI headquarters sifting through the billions and billions of text looking for keywords and phrases which might alert the government of possible terrorist or anti-government activity. Washington-based EPIC has charged that the FBI is breaking the Freedom of Information Act by refusing to bring forth any and all information that it has gathered on Carnivore. The Act stipulates that this information must be provided to the public within a 10-day mandated period. "The judge directed the FBI to get started very quickly and indicated that he is going to supervise the process," said David Sobel, EPIC's general counsel. This controversy comes at a crucial time politically since the Clinton [Mr. Bill Clinton, President of the U.S.] administration has proposed changing wiretap laws. Therefore, the public should now have as much information as possible. EPIC claims that Carnivore has the capability to comb through millions of email messages in efforts to monitor traffic held by ISPs (Internet Service Providers) worldwide. Carnivore intercepts and analyzes these messages looking for criminal activity. Coincidentally, the U.K. is about to pass legislation (October 5, 2000), which will give its government sweeping powers to access the email of its citizenry, including email that is encrypted. Last month, the assistant director of the FBI, Donald Kerr, defended staunchly Carnivore's capabilities before a Congressional Committee. The system does not "search through the contents of every message and collect those that contain certain keywords like 'bomb' or 'drugs,'" Kerr said. Instead, he explained, the system sniffs out messages based on parameters prescribed only by court order. In any event, EPIC plans to hold out for public disclosure of Carnivore. The objective of the group is for the FBI to release all records gathered by the FBI and provide those records to the general public, including information on the software that the application runs on and any legal analyses that Carnivore has performed. As it stands, the Federal Judge has ordered the FBI to provide this information to the courts immediately and he has vowed to monitor the FBI's compliance with that order. We will be following the progress of this ruling in future technology articles at TheWorldJournal.com © August 27, 2000 |
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