IP: more on Carnivore

[Dave Farber <farber () cis upenn edu>]

> From: Russell Nelson <nelson () crynwr com>
> Date: Sun, 16 Jul 2000 09:40:31 -0400 (EDT)
> To: farber () cis upenn edu
>
> Dave Farber writes:
>  > ><http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20000713.html>
>
> I don't believe this analysis is correct.  The FBI has a history of
> using custom boxes to accomplish its wiretapping and pen-tracing
> (traffic analysis) function.  No, the real problem with Carnivore is
> the obvious one: that we cannot trust the FBI to restrict its use to
> capturing email.  The FBI, on the other hand, does not wish to trust
> each and every ISP with keeping the secret of whose email is being
> tapped.  In some cases it would be risky to do an in-host email tap.
> And yet, how could we verify that the FBI is really restricting its
> use of Carnivore to only capturing email?  We could have US Marshalls
> (a division of the Justice department) conduct an audit of the
> software, but how could we know that the FBI was actually running the
> same software that had been audited??  This is a difficult problem,
> and one that we cannot allow the FBI to punt ("just trust us") on.
>
> --
> -russ nelson <sig () russnelson com>  http://russnelson.com
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