FBI takes the teeth out of Carnivore's name

[InfoSec News <isn () C4I ORG>]

http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200-4769965.html?tag=mn_hd

[DCS1000 sounds more like Kodak's newest professional digital camera,
than an e-mail surveillance system. :)   - WK]

By Erich Luening
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
February 9, 2001, 10:05 a.m. PT

The FBI has dressed its online wolf in sheep's clothing, changing the
name of its controversial e-mail surveillance system, known to this
point as Carnivore.

Carnivore now goes by the less beastly moniker of DCS1000, drawn from
the work it does as a "digital collection system." The investigative
agency built the tool to monitor the Internet communications of
suspects under its surveillance, but the system, housed on computers
at Internet service providers, also can collect e-mail messages from
people who are not part of an FBI probe.

A spokesman for the FBI denied that the name change stemmed from
worries that the name Carnivore made the system sound like a predatory
device made to invade people's privacy. But the Illinois Institute of
Technology, which last fall issued an analysis of the system at the
request of the Justice Department, recommended that the name be
changed for just that reason, according to an IIT analyst.

"We had a concern that it wasn't a good name for the system," said the
IIT's Larry Reynolds. The group thought the name should be dumped, he
said, "because of the very definition of the word."

The name change is the latest development in the controversy
surrounding the surveillance tool, which came under public scrutiny
last summer when privacy advocates began to decry it. In September,
the Justice Department picked the IIT Research Institute to perform a
government-sponsored technical review of the software.

The rechristening is part of an upgrade that incorporates other
recommendations from the research group, according to Paul Bresson, a
spokesman for the FBI. "It isn't because we were worried about
negative privacy publicity. If it was, we would have changed (the
name) months ago," he said. "This (system) is not something that
remains static."

The upgrade was supposed to be coordinated with a Justice Department
report on DCS1000 scheduled for release prior to Janet Reno's
departure last month as attorney general, Bresson said. He did not say
when that report will be made public.

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