What is carnivore?
Carnivore is a proprietary software program formerly used by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to surreptitiously intercept emails and Internet traffic. Its publicly stated purpose was to collect incriminating evidence against child pornographers, suspected terrorists, online fraud and other crimes. In 2005, it was widely reported that Carnivore was replaced by commercially available software. Carnivore was purportedly used to monitor traffic on some Internet Service Provider’s (ISP) servers between the late 1990s and 2005. Though the government has been reluctant to discuss the particulars of Carnivore, some facts have been fairly well established. Carnivore was a “packet sniffer” designed to read headers on passing packets of information. Headers include sender/receiver information, among other details. By scanning all passing packets on an ISP server, Carnivore could utilize a filtering system to automatically copy and log any packets that matched certain criteria. The
Carnivore is an automated system developed and used by the FBI to scan electronic mail messages. Carnivore includes both hardware and software components installed at a suspect’s Internet service provider, although few details about its capabilities and limitations are known. Critics have referred to Carnivore as a “black box” capable of broad privacy violations with little or no accountability, while the FBI says that Carnivore enhances privacy by enabling the FBI to limit the communications that it intercepts to those specifically authorized by a court. On July 12, 2000, the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) filed a Freedom of Information Act request asking the FBI to release all of its records on Carnivore, including the source code. The FBI and the Justice Department ignored EPIC’s request, and EPIC subsequently obtained a court order requiring the FBI to disclose Carnivore documents. The FBI says that it has located 3000 pages of material on Carnivore. On October 2, 200
The information we have comes from the FBI’s intentionally vague online description of the device and various statements made to the Senate and House of Representatives. According to the FBI’s Web site, “The Carnivore device works much like commercial ‘sniffers’…it provides the FBI with a unique ability to distinguish between communications which may be lawfully intercepted and those which may not.…Carnivore serves to limit the messages viewable by human eyes to those which are strictly included within the court order.” On a performance note, Donald M. Kerr, an assistant director in the FBI, told the United States Senate Judiciary Committee that “Specifically, it filters binary code—streams of O’s and 1’s that flow through an ISP network, for example, at 40 mega-bits per second and often at much higher speeds. Carnivore operates real time with these speeds.” Tom Perrine, security director for the San Diego Supercomputer Center, was given the opportunity to observe a Carnivore system. T
