FBI Releases More Documents On Carnivore

The FBI released another batch of previously classified
documents on its now infamous e-mail surveillance system,
also known as "Carnivore."

Among the 362 pages released today are documents that appear
to indicate the FBI's surveillance device could trap more
data than necessary, a suspicion widely held by a number of
consumer and privacy groups since news of Carnivore broke
earlier this year.

"The information in today's packet seems to conflict with what the
FBI said about how Carnivore collects information that's been filtered,"
said David Sobel, general counsel for the Electronic Privacy Information
Center (EPIC), the group that filed the Freedom of Information Act
lawsuit, which led a court to force the Justice Department to begin
releasing the documents.

The FBI has assured consumers and privacy groups that its
e-mail surveillance system only traps messages that are specified
under a court order. In a hearing before Congress on the matter,
the FBI testified that the system only captures data that has been
isolated by a software filter that "minimizes" collection and
limits it to scope of information authorized under the court order.

But according to several of the documents obtained today which
document an early "real world" PC test of the system, Carnivore
is "capable of capturing and archiving all traffic to the hard drive."

Sobel said that admission seems to suggest that FBI's surveillance
tool may in fact capture data that does not necessarily relate to the
investigation at hand.

"I always go into this process of getting these documents with the
assumption that they're really going to raise questions and not
give us answers," Sobel said. "But this clearly gives us some
answers."

Pursuant to the court order, the FBI promised to release batches
of records at 45-day intervals. This is the second such interval.

The release of documents came in reply to a Freedom of Information Act
request issued by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC),
which convinced a court to ask the FBI to make available information
on the e-mail snooping device.

According to documents posted on the Electronic Privacy Information
Center's (EPIC) Web site, the Carnivore
program began under the name "Omnivore" in February 1997,
originally run on a Solaris X86 computer. That system was replaced
two years later by Carnivore, which uses a Windows NT-based
computer that attaches to an ISP's network to sift through incoming
and outgoing traffic.

In the last batch of 400 pages or so, the FBI had redacted or blackened
out more than half of the content. Sobel said the latest batch seems to
be less censored.

But, he said, the FBI said it is anticipating the disclosure process would
be completed by Dec. 1.

"We have now received less than a 1000 pages," out of the total
3,000 documents the FBI said it had relating to Carnivore back in
August.

"I think that means they're going to end up withholding the bulk of it,
because I can't believe within the next few weeks they're going to process
a great number of additional documents," Sobel said.

Today's disclosure comes just one day before an independent review
team at the Illinois Institute of Technology Research Institute (IITRI) is
expected to file a draft technical report on the Carnivore system.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and a number of
privacy groups have declared the "independent review" a sham,
noting that the IITRI review team members include a former
Clinton administration policy advisor and a former Justice Department
official. Several other members of the team have backgrounds
with the National Security Agency.

EPIC plans to post excerpts and photographs contained in the documents
on its Web site, at http://www.epic.org.