Anti-Carnivore FUD or Brave New Internet?

[Secret Squirrel]

http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20000713.html

    JULY 13, 2000

     Meet Eater
            The FBI's Plan for Digital Wiretaps Raises More Questions Than It 
            Answers

            By Robert X. Cringely


            There is this moment toward the otherwise forgettable end of "Star 
            Trek V: The Final Frontier" when this alien creature patterned after 
            the Wizard of Oz has even Spock convinced that it is God with a 
            capital "G." They are just about to fire-up the Enterprise and take 
            "God" back to Earth when Kirk -- probably hoping to avoid the 
            military protocol involved with having a deity on the bridge -- asks 
            a pivotal question: Why would God need a starship? Couldn't God just 
            blink and instantly be in Times Square looking up at the NASDAQ 
            sign, wondering why they cut windows into a video screen? 

            This scene of the skeptical Kirk flashed in my mind this week as I 
            read about Carnivore, the FBI's system for reading the e-mail of bad 
            guys. Carnivore is a sealed box that is installed at the network 
            operations center of an Internet Service Provider. It filters 
            packets, finds e-mail going to and from identified criminals, and 
            saves that e-mail for later decryption and analysis. What bothers 
            the Internet Service Providers is they have no control over the 
            Carnivore box, and no way of protecting the privacy of all the 
            customers who aren't drug lords or escaped felons. What bothers the 
            American Civil Liberties Union is the likelihood that individuals 
            will not only lose their right to privacy, but lose it in a new and 
            insidious way. 

            What bothers me is the damned box. Why would the FBI need a box? 
            Here's all the FBI will say about Carnivore. It sits on the network 
            at the ISP, is PC-based, is "a kind of a sniffer," identifies and 
            saves packets associated with suspected criminals, is installed 
            under a court order, and doesn't itself act as a decryption device. 
            There are supposed to be around 20 Carnivore boxes, and they have 
            been in use since early this year. You don't need a sealed box to do 
            any of these tasks, most of which are already being done for 
            completely legal reasons right inside the router at every ISP. 
            Routers look at every packet, determine what type of packet it is, 
            where it is coming from and where it is going to, then the router 
            delivers the packet to its intended destination. This is what 
            routers do. Adding the Carnivore task is a simple matter of blind 
            copying every packet to or from a bad guy to a third address at the 
            J. Edgar Hoover FBI Building in Washington, DC. It's at most a few 
            lines of code and requires no additional hardware. 

            So why the box? 

            The probable reason is because cops like to be in control. They LIKE 
            boxes, like delivering them in unmarked cars, like the satisfying 
            click of the RJ-45 connector as it slides home. Maybe they don't 
            know that it could all be done without a box. Heck, it IS being done 
            without a box all the time, and that's where the ACLU is missing the 
            point. Sniffers have been running on networks ever since Harry Saal 
            invented the device. Every packet at every ISP already goes through 
            a sniffer at least part of the time. An ISP could do at any time 
            what we fear the FBI might do with Carnivore read the e-mail and 
            follow the surfing habits of every pretty blonde customer. Good 
            ISPs, which is to say nearly all ISPs don't do this, of course, but 
            it happens. 

            So why doesn't the FBI just get a court order making the ISP do the 
            dirty work? That's what the ISPs wonder, too, especially since 
            that's how phone taps are handled. Cops don't really climb poles and 
            attach alligator clips to hear phone calls. That's all done at the 
            central office by telephone company technicians. 

            The FBI, through the use of Carnivore, is trying to grab a little 
            more power. And by doing it themselves with Carnivore, the FBI 
            doesn't have to reveal the identity of the bad guy or extent to 
            which it is using the box. Yeah, right. 

            But wait, it gets worse. There are aspects of this case that the 
            ACLU hasn't even considered. The Carnivore boxes are what's called 
            "co-located" at the ISP. This isn't a rare thing. Many organizations 
            like to control their own Web or mail servers and so co-locate them 
            at an ISP. Colocation puts your server closer to the Internet 
            backbone, eliminates typical T-1 line costs, allows the ISP to 
            monitor and reboot the server, and usually comes with nifty things 
            like redundant backbone connections and diesel generators in case 
            the power goes out. Companies in the co-location business include 
            well-known names like AT&T, IBM, and Intel. So there are tens of 
            thousands -- maybe hundreds of thousands -- of computers already 
            installed just like the FBI installs its Carnivore boxes. What keeps 
            those co-located computers from being sniffers, too? Nothing at all. 
            For $300 per month, you too could install your own Carnivore box at 
            the ISP of your choice. Co-location facilities don't really care 
            what you do with your co-located server as long as you keep paying 
            the bill. 

            More technically astute readers may take exception to this idea of 
            private Carnivore boxes since there are ways to isolate ISP traffic 
            and keep one box from seeing all the packets on the ISP network. But 
            at most ISPs, THOSE TECHNIQUES AREN'T USED. 

            This still leaves us wondering why the FBI insists on this program 
            that isn't really necessary to do what they say they want to do. 
            Beyond my overzealous cop theory, the most obvious possibility is 
            that Carnivore is actually intended to do something else, some 
            different task than the FBI is saying. Privacy advocates and the 
            ACLU seem fixated on the idea that the Feds will use Carnivore to 
            eavesdrop on non-criminals. It makes sense to worry about this, 
            given past FBI anti-privacy campaigns like the Clipper Chip fiasco 
            of several years ago that was supposed to have made it possible for 
            the FBI to tap up to 10 million simultaneous telephone 
            conversations, even though there are only an average of 1500 
            court-ordered phone taps each year in the U.S. 

            But I have my own theory about Carnivore. From a network 
            architecture standpoint, the best location for Carnivore is right 
            after the ISP's router. This puts Carnivore in the path of every 
            packet entering or leaving the ISP. It's also a major reason why 
            ISPs might not want to install Carnivore boxes -- it's the network's 
            point of greatest vulnerability. In this position, Carnivore can act 
            as a listening and recording device, OR IT CAN ACT AS A SWITCH. If 
            we ever hear a proposal from the FBI in which it plans to install 
            Carnivores at all 6000 ISPs in the U.S., we'll be giving the 
            government the power to do something it can't do right now. 

            Shut the Internet down. 



"We've got a Carnivore^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h ChildSavor box, we're using 
the case as a radio antenna, and we know that's not allowed!"
---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:----
Timothy C. May               | Shit Disturbing: Anarchy in the streets, 
Brain's Moral Compass        | digital money-laundering, zero-knowledge 
W.A.S.T.E.D - Proud Author of| gun purchases, collapse of Federal buildings
many prompt checks to the IRS| "Nuts like me give Orrin Hatch wet dreams"

"When the Revolution comes, they'll start working their way through Tim's Killfiles."