Does Carnivore do content-searching, such as sniffing e-mails that contain the word “plutonium”?
No. Carnivore does not “search” Internet traffic; it instead “decodes” the traffic looking for addresses, and collects only the data that matches the addresses it is looking for. There is more to it than that. Content-searching would be illegal. A judge would never give a court order that would allow content-searching. The FBI may have other systems for illegally searching content. They may also illegally deploy their content-searching system along with Carnivore when they have a court order. However, since “Carnivore” is the name of the system that complies with court orders, then by definition, Carnivore does not do content-searching. Note, however, that Carnivore does have the built-in capability to do content searches. This content-searching system was designed for the legal purpose of gathering web-based e-mail, but it could be subverted to search for any pattern. In other words, while it wasn’t designed for content-searching, and the FBI does not intend to use Carnivore for conte
