IP: Toothless Carnivore? from Brock Meeks

[Dave Farber <farber@cis.upenn.edu>]

>From: Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com>
>
>
>**********
>
>From: "Meeks, Brock" <Brock.Meeks@MSNBC.COM>
>To: "'declan@well.com'" <declan@well.com>
>Subject: Toothless Carnivore
>Date: Thu, 14 Sep 2000 12:02:21 -0700
>
>Yesterday, during a House hearing on Mob involvement on Wall St., Thomas
>Fuentes, chief of the FBI's Organized Crime Division, coughed up the
>following hairball (which I reported yesterday) when asked if e-mail
>interception was helpful during FBI investigations.  Fuentes had earlier
>groused about how technology and the Internet were making his job harder.
>
>As a bonus tidbit, Fuentes admitted that the cyrpto genie was out of the
>bottle.
>
>The following is transcribed verbatim from yesterday's hearing:
>
>Fuentes:  The difficulty with e-mail is that you really don't hear the tone
>of voice.  You can't tell if the person is screaming, it helps to hear the
>tone of the voice in trying to determine are they are saying this
>tongue-in-cheek or do they really mean it, are they really going to fly to
>Arizona and kill somebody and kill his wife and hold him hostage,  is he
>kidding.
>
>Does the person at the other end show fear in that conversation so that we
>could say, they are using intimidation and threats of violence and they're
>serious.  Because you can hear these kinds of conversations in the locker
>room at your health club and the people don't really mean it, they're
>getting ready for a tennis game or something.
>
>But in our case they mean it, more often than not, and that's the part that
>is conveyed through the telephone or through microphone interception that
>e-mail interception will never substitute for.
>
>Q: do you accept the premise that encryption technology is readily available
>to be downloaded even overseas and to be used?
>
>Fuentes:  [pause] Yes.