IP: Carnivore Details Emerge

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

>Date: Wed, 4 Oct 2000 18:35:22 -0700 (PDT)
>From: Kevin Poulsen <klp@well.com>
>To: Dave Farber <farber@cis.upenn.edu>
>Subject: Carnivore Details Emerge
>
>
>Dave,
>
>Ip'ers may be interested in my story on the documents EPIC FOIA'd on
>Carnivore.
>
>A few of the documents have been scanned and are at:
>http://www.epic.org/privacy/carnivore/foia_documents.html
>
>-Kevin
>
>http://www.securityfocus.com/news/097
>
>Carnivore Details Emerge
>
>WASHINGTON--The FBI's Carnivore surveillance tool monitors more than just
>email.
>
>Newly declassified documents obtained by Electronic Privacy Information
>Center (EPIC) under the Freedom of Information Act reveal that Carnivore
>can monitor all of a target user's Internet traffic, and, in conjunction
>with other FBI tools, can reconstruct web pages exactly as a surveillance
>target saw them while surfing the web.
>
>The capability is one of the new details to emerge from some six-hundred
>pages of heavily redacted documents given to the Washington-based
>nonprofit group this week, and reviewed by SecurityFocus Wednesday.
>
>The documents confirm that Carnivore grew from an earlier FBI project
>called Omnivore, but reveal for the first time that Omnivore itself
>replaced a still older tool. The name of that project was carefully
>blacked out of the documents, and remains classified "secret."
>
>The older surveillance system had "deficiencies that rendered the design
>solution unacceptable." The project was eventually shut down.
>
>Development of Omnivore began in February 1997, and the first prototypes
>were delivered on October 31st of that year. The FBI's eagerness to use
>the system may have slowed its development: one report notes that it
>became "difficult to maintain the schedule," because the Bureau deployed
>the nascent surveillance tool for "several emergency situations" while it
>was still in beta release. "The field deployments used development team
>personnel to support the technical challenges surrounding the insertion of
>the OMNIVORE device," reads the report.
>
><snip>