Carnivore

From ArtSoftware

Carnivore is a name given to a system implemented by the Federal Bureau of Investigation that is analogous to Telephone wiretapping except in this case, e-mail and other communications are being tapped instead of telephone conversations. Carnivore was essentially a customizable packet sniffer that could monitor all of a target user's Internet traffic. It is a form of policeware. United States government officials will confirm or deny little about the physical or logical workings of Carnivore, but there are some basic facts that are generally agreed upon.

In order to be affected, a computer must be temporarily connected to a computer physically installed at an Internet service provider (ISP) or other location where it can "sniff" traffic on a local area network (LAN) segment to look for email messages in transit. The technology itself is not highly advanced — using a standard packet sniffer and some fairly straightforward filtering (such as a Perl script), one could easily duplicate this functionality. Getting the cooperation of the ISPs or the owner of the LAN onto which Carnivore is to be placed can either be voluntary, illegal, or by court order; however, once a system is in place it is allegedly not allowed to simply capture every email that passes through the system — by existing U.S. law, publicly acknowledged USG personnel are required to get a warrant or court order naming specific people or email addresses that may be monitored. When an email passes through that matches the filtering criteria mandated by the warrant, the message is logged along with information on the date, time, origin and destination. This logging is most likely relayed in real time to the FBI but the details are not currently known. All other traffic would presumably be dropped without logging or capture.

The software grew from an earlier FBI project called Omnivore. Omnivore began in February 1997, and was then rebranded. After prolonged negative coverage in the press, the FBI changed the name of its system from "Carnivore" to the more benign-sounding "DCS1000." DCS is reported to stand for "Digital Collection System"; the system has the same functions as before. The three separate packages Carnivore, Packeteer and CoolMiner, are referred to as the DragonWare Suite.

It has been reported, [1] as of the middle of January 2005, that the FBI has essentially abandoned the use of Carnivore in 2001, in favor of commercially available software.