"From Wiretapping Phone Calls to Scanning E-mail
Who's reading your e-mail?
http://rwor.org/a/v22/1070-79/1070/carnivore.htm

Revolutionary Worker #1070, September 17, 2000 (Before Bush Bashing began)

The Clinton administration has pressed hard for laws extending federal ability to wiretap signing the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) which required telephone companies to design their equipment by 1998 to allow federal wiretaps of phone calls and certain "call-identifying information."

In 1999 the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) approved technical requirements proposed by the Clinton administration that would enable the police to locate individuals using cell phones.

It has already been revealed in articles in the mainstream press that the U.S. government is involved in extensive international spying on the Internet using a highly secret spying program called Echelon. The U.S. government's National Security Agency (NSA) operates Echelon jointly with the spying agencies of allied governments. It uses a network of listening posts around the world to scan a large portion of the world's e-mail, fax and telephone traffic. It uses keywords to pluck messages off the airwaves for government agents to read. Because Echelon is international, U.S. spy agencies receive information on U.S. citizens that they could not legally obtain inside U.S. borders. In a Congressional hearing FBI spokesman Kerr acknowledged that his agency receives information "from time to time" in this way.

Now the exposure of Carnivore reveals a new side of the U.S. government's press for police spying. What is unique about Carnivore is that it monitors private Internet e-mail communications something the government has apparently had difficulty doing before.

More than 1.4 billion e-mail messages are sent every day around the world most of them in the U.S. People increasingly use Internet discussion groups and e-mail for correspondence of all kinds including political planning and debate. The media has reported that police forces have repeatedly been surprised recently by the size of political demonstrations and actions which were planned and publicized using e-mail and various forms of Internet discussion. Philadelphia police spied on IRC chat groups to learn about the plans of protesters during the recent Republican convention.

How It Works

The FBI political police clearly want the ability to routinely spy on the massive flow of Internet e-mail and Carnivore deals with three built-in technical challenges of Internet wiretaps: First, people can get their e-mail from different locations, so that wiretapping their home phone is no guarantee of reading their e-mail messages. Second, Internet connections, by their nature, travel over different, rapidly changing routes every time users log on to the Internet. And third, there is an explosively growing volume of e-mail traffic, making it hard to scan the tremendous flow of Internet traffic.

The Carnivore solution is to wiretap the communication at that one point where targeted e-mail must go: through the computers of an Internet Service Provider (ISP). Everyone with an e-mail account has an ISP a company or institution whose computers connect the user to the larger Internet. The FBI's Black Boxes (containing both hardware and software) are installed on the ISP's equipment on the ISP's "server," the computer that processes and stores e-mail from the Internet.

It remains impossible for the FBI to wiretap just one e-mail account so these Black Boxes seize, copy, store and scan all the traffic going through an ISP s server which can involve the e-mail of hundreds or thousands of people. It has recently been confirmed by leading architects of the Internet, in Senate testimony, that once a Black Box is installed at a server, the FBI can wiretap anyone whose traffic runs through that server. There is every reason to suspect that the FBI intends to have Black Boxes semi-permanently installed on the servers of major ISPs, so that they can spy on traffic at will.

The Carnivore system would enable the FBI to install a Black Box in the guise of, say, investigating a case of interstate fraud but then also intercept the e-mail traffic of political activists and organizations who use that same server. The police agents could save and store large amounts of e-mail for later analysis. The ISPs have no way of knowing what the FBI is doing with the e-mail traffic or how many people they are spying on.

The Carnivore e-mail spy system is capable of two modes: It can download entire e-mail messages going to and from a targeted e-mail account so the contents of the messages can be read by agents. Or it can record just the e-mail addresses (the so-called "header information" not the mail content) of the e-mail traffic. Widely available encryption software can prevent government agents from reading the content of encoded e-mail messages and the use of such encryption is spreading. But Carnivore would still enable federal agents to do a surveillance of the header information of even such encrypted messages, and develop a detailed record of the networks of people communicating together on a project."