What sorts of methods are used by the authorities to monitor terrorist Internet activity?
The “Puzzle Palace” is the nickname for the world’s most powerful and sophisticated electronic eavesdropping and antiterrorism system. It allows supercomputers to monitor and investigate millions of online and telephone messages every day. Another surveillance system is called Total Information Awareness. It’s designed to search and identify suspicious messages from potential terrorists among the everyday traffic of millions of Internet users. Capturing traffic over the Net is called “sniffing,” with the sniffer being the software that searches the traffic to find those items it is programmed to find. One sniffer, “Carnivore,” had been in use before 9/11 and was officially unveiled by the FBI afterward. It operates like a telephone wiretap applied to the Internet. Encryption is software that locks computerized information to keep it private; only those with an “electronic key” can decode the information. One of the latest eavesdropping systems, codenamed “Magic Lantern,” is a program t
