CARNIVORE...It's BACK with a Vengence !....Read on-

How do you think Mr. Bush and company have been Eavesdropping on us? Why did GOOGLE go to court to Block the FBI from gaining access to our Internet communications/Searches?

ACLU

One of the most significant provisions of the Patriot Act makes it far easier for the authorities to gain access to records of citizens' activities being held by a third party. At a time when computerization is leading to the creation of more and more such records, Section 215 of the Patriot Act allows the FBI to force anyone at all - including doctors, libraries, bookstores, universities, and Internet service providers - to turn over records on their clients or customers

You may have heard about CARNAVORE (DCS1000), a controversial program developed by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to give the agency access to the online/e-mail activities of suspected criminals, and now the unsuspecting US Citizen. For many, it is eerily reminiscent of George Orwell's book " 1984". (DIAGRAM)

Just 45 days after the September 11 attacks, with virtually no debate, Congress passed the USA PATRIOT Act.(ACT) .There are significant flaws in the Patriot Act, flaws that threaten your fundamental freedoms by giving the government the power to access to your medical records, Internet history/archives, tax records, information about the books you buy or borrow without probable cause, and the power to break into your home and conduct secret searches without telling you for weeks, months, or indefinitely.

Although Carnivore was supposedly abandoned by the FBI in favor of commercially available eavesdropping software by January 2005, the program that once promised to renew the FBI's specific influence in the world of computer communications monitoring is nonetheless been modified and upgraded in the shadow of the ACT, yet remains intriguing in its structure and application

What exactly was Carnivore? Where did it come from? How did it work? What was its purpose? In this treatise, you will learn the answers to these questions and more.

Carnivorous Evolution

Omnivore was retired in late 1999 in favor of a more comprehensive system, the DragonWare Suite, which allowed the FBI to reconstruct e-mail messages, downloaded files or even Web pages.

DragonWare contained three parts:

Carnivore - A Windows NT/2000-based system that captures the information.

Packeteer - No official information released, but presumably an application for reassembling packets into cohesive messages or Web pages.

Coolminer - No official information released, but presumably an application for extrapolating and analyzing data found in the messages. As you can see, officials never released much information about the DragonWare Suite, nothing about Packeteer and Coolminer and very little detailed information about Carnivore.

But we do know that Carnivore IS basically a packet sniffer, a technology that is quite common and has been around for a while.

Packet Sniffing

Computer network administrators have used packet sniffers for years to monitor their networks and perform diagnostic tests or troubleshoot problems. Essentially, a packet sniffer is a program that can see all of the information passing over the network.

As data streams back and forth on the network, the program looks at, or "sniffs," each packet.

Normally, a computer only looks at packets addressed to it and ignores the rest of the traffic on the network. Today post ACT , when a packet sniffer is set up on a computer, the sniffer's network interface is set to promiscuous mode. This means that it is looking at everything that comes through.

The amount of traffic largely depends on the location of the computer in the network. A client system out on an isolated branch of the network sees only a small segment of the network traffic, while the main domain server sees almost all of it.

A packet sniffer can usually be set up in one of two ways:

Unfiltered - Captures all of the packets

Filtered - Captures only those packets containing specific data elements.

Packets that contain targeted data are copied as they pass through. The program stores the copies in memory or on a hard drive, depending on the program's configuration. These copies can then be analyzed carefully for specific information or patterns.

When you connect to the Internet, you are joining a network maintained by your ISP. The ISP's network communicates with other networks maintained by other ISPs to form the foundation of the Internet.

A packet sniffer located at one of the servers of your ISP would potentially be able to monitor all of your online activities, such as:

Which Web sites you visit
What you look at on the site
Whom you send e-mail to
What's in the e-mail you send
What you download from a site

What streaming events you use, such as audio, video and Internet telephony

Who visits your site (if you have a Web site).

In fact, many ISPs use packet sniffers as diagnostic tools. Also, a lot of ISPs maintain copies of data, such as e-mail, as part of their back-up systems.

Carnivore and its sister programs ARE a controversial step forward for the FBI, but they were not new technology.

The Process
Now that you know a bit about what Carnivore was, let's take a look at how it worked:

Before the Patriot ACT of 2001, if the FBI had a reasonable suspicion that someone was engaged in criminal activities they would request a court order to view the suspects online activity

A court would then grant the request for a full content-wiretap of e-mail traffic only and issued an order.

A term used in telephone surveillance, "content-wiretap" means that everything in the packet can be captured and used. The other type of wiretap is a trap-and-trace, which means that the FBI can only capture the destination information, such as the e-mail account of a message being sent out or the Web-site address that the suspect is visiting.

A reverse form of trap-and-trace, called pen-register, tracks where e-mail to the suspect is coming from or where visits to a suspects Web site originate.

The FBI contacts the suspects ISP and requests a copy of the back-up files of the suspects activity.

The ISP does not maintain customer-activity data as part of its back-up.

The FBI sets up a Carnivore computer at the ISP to monitor the suspects activity.

Attorney General Ashcroft has gone to great lengths to keep secret even the most basic information about the FBI's spying. For example, in answering questions posed by the House Judiciary Committee, he classified information that should not have been classified, including information that would have shown how often the FBI is spying on people based on their exercise of First Amendment rights.

The Patriot Act sniffer computer ( A DCS1000 version) probably consists of:

A Pentium VI Windows NT/2006 6+GB system with 1024 megabytes (MB) of RAM.

A commercial advanced communications software application.

A custom C++ application that works in conjunction with the commercial
program above to provide the packet sniffing and filtering.

A type of physical lockout system that requires a special passcode to access the computer (This keeps anyone but the FBI from physically accessing the Carnivore system.)

A network isolation device that makes the Carnivore system invisible to anything else on the network (This prevents anyone from hacking into the system from another computer.)

A 25-gigabyte (GB) Iomega Jaz drive for storing the captured data (The Jaz drive uses 25-GB removable cartridges that can be swapped out as easily as a floppy disk.)

The FBI used to configure the Carnivore software with the IP address of the citizen(s) so that Carnivore would only capture packets from these particular location's . And rather than ignoring all other packets as Carnavore did, this Latest Patriot Act model SNIFF's them all!

Carnivore copied all of the packets from the suspects system without impeding the flow of the network traffic.

Once the copies are made, they go through a filter that only keeps the e-mail packets. The program determines what the packets contain based on the protocol of the packet. For example, all e-mail packets use the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP).

The e-mail packets are saved to the Jaz cartridge.

Once every day or two, an FBI agent would visit the ISP and swaps out the Jaz cartridge. The agent takes the retrieved cartridge and puts it in a container that is dated and sealed. If the seal is broken, the person breaking it must sign, date and reseal it -- otherwise, the cartridge can be considered "compromised."

Before the Patriot Act, the surveillance could not continue for more than a month without an extension from the court. Once complete, the FBI removed the system from the ISP.

The captured data is processed using Packeteer and Coolminer.

If the results provide enough evidence, the FBI can use them as part of a case against the suspect.

Prey of the Carnivore

The FBI plan's used Carnivore for specific reasons. Particularly, the agency would have had to request a court order to use Carnivore when a person was suspected of:

Terrorism
Child pornography/exploitation
Espionage
Information warfare
Fraud

There are some key issues that caused a great deal of concern from various sources, before the Patriot Act.

Privacy - Many folks viewed Carnivore as a severe violation of privacy.
While the potential for abuse was certainly there, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) used to provide legal protection of privacy for all types of electronic communication's was all set aside in 2001....

It used to be, any type of electronics surveillance required a court order and must show probable cause that the suspect is engaged in criminal activities. Therefore, use of Carnivore in any way, prior to the 2001 ACT, that did not adhere to ECPA was illegal and could be considered unconstitutional.

Gee whats the fuss now? Our constitutional rights are now in perpetual peril !

Regulation - Prior to the ACT, there was a widespread belief that Carnivore was a huge system that could allow the U.S. government to seize control of the Internet and regulate its use, with our current computing technology, that is a true fact !(Redundancy aside! )

100's of Millions of dollars have been spent to create an amazing infrastructure- -- the FBI is placing Post ACT Carnivore systems at every ISP, including private, commercial, organizations and educational.

While it is theoretically possible to do so for all of the ISPs operating in the United States, they still have not figured out a way to regulate those operating outside of U.S. jurisdiction.

Any such move would have also faced serious opposition from every direction.

Free speech - The NEW Carnivore monitor's all of the content flowing through an ISP, looking for certain keywords such as "bomb" or "assassination."

Any packet sniffer can be set to look for certain patterns of characters or data. Before the ACT, without probable cause, the FBI had no justification to monitor your online activity and would have been in severe violation of ECPA and your constitutional right to free speech if it did so.

Echelon - This is a secret network rumored to be already employed by the National Security Agency (NSA), supposedly designed to detect and capture packets crossing international borders that contain certain keywords, such as "bomb" or "assassination."

It can be acknowledged that the International outcry would be so severe at least justifying the secrecy of Echelon . There is no solid evidence to support the existence of Echelon. Many people could confuse this system with the Carnivore system-but they are actually two different commonities!

Prior to the ACT, all of these concerns made the implementation of Carnivore an uphill battle for the FBI. The FBI refused to disclose the source code and certain other pieces of technical information about Carnivore, which only added to people's concerns.

Safe and Free: There has never been a more urgent need to preserve fundamental privacy protections and our system of checks and balances than the need we face today, as illegal government spying, provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act and government-sponsored invasions transcend the bounds of law and our most treasured values in the name of national security.

MIRVman