Watching the detectives

In the movies, an atomic bomb test woke Godzilla and sent him crashing ashore to destroy Tokyo. Last month's bid by NTT Communications for Verio raised Carnivore, the FBI's little-known plans for e-mail surveillance of Americans. The aftershocks have been felt from Capitol Hill to the data centers of the country's largest ISPs.

The Internet wiretapping application used by the FBI - called "Carnivore" because it gets at the meat of e-mail traffic from surveillance subjects - has drawn objections from service providers and privacy advocates and prompted at least one congressional inquiry, scheduled to take place this week before the House Judiciary Constitution Committee. More important, Carnivore may provide the pretext for a larger discussion on what happens when Internet globalization collides with the need to control national security - and how much control is permitted.

In late June, the FBI expressed concern that the $5.5 billion bid by NTT to acquire Verio, a Colorado-based ISP, would impair its ability to perform court-sanctioned tapping of American's Internet communications. Through a panel called the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S., the Treasury Department opened a 45 day investigation of the deal. Faced with that obstacle, NTT has twice extended its tender for Verio while denying any security risk to the U.S. The tender now will end on July 31.

At the time, analysts said the FBI roadblock was likely part of a U.S. attempt to pressure Japan, which holds a 53% stake in NTT, into interconnection rate reductions (see story on page 9). But the move also drew attention to Internet eavesdropping, and particularly to Carnivore, which the FBI demonstrated at a June meeting of the Telecommunications Industry Association.

Carnivore is contained on a server, which is often co-located on a service provider's premises and is accessible only to FBI agents. Details are hard to come by, but the system can "sniff out" the traffic to and from a specific IP address and copy elements of it - everything from time and date of instant messages to the contents of an e-mail. The FBI maintains that Carnivore provides a "surgical" ability to perform legal Internet wiretaps while ignoring traffic that it is not authorized to see.

But in a letter to Congress, the American Civil Liberties Union said, "Unlike the operation of a traditional wiretap of a conventional phone line, Carnivore gives the FBI access to all traffic over the ISP's network, not just the communications to or from a particular target."

Also unlike a traditional phone tap, which may simply record incoming and outgoing numbers on a specific phone line, Carnivore could allow agents to view header information that suggests the content of a message, even when that kind of surveillance has not been authorized by the courts.

The ACLU also said that Carnivore's claim to retain only information on the surveillance subject is not verified either by the target's ISP or by the courts. "This `trust us, we are the government' approach is the antithesis of the procedures required under our wiretapping laws," the letter said.

On July 14, the ACLU requested the Carnivore source code to determine how the software works and to better judge its impact on individual privacy. The FBI is required to reply to that request by Aug. 3.

Privacy advocates aren't the only ones opposing Carnivore. Some ISPs have made public their opposition on technological grounds. Late last year, No. 2 ISP EarthLink was called on to place a Carnivore device at its Pasadena, Calif., hub. Operations support system incompatibility with the device forced EarthLink to install an older version of its operating system on the hub's remote access servers, which subsequently crashed, downing service to subscribers.

Last week, EarthLink reached an agreement with the FBI to collect e-mail wiretap results itself.

"ISPs are understandably resistant to having black boxes within their network," said Brent Bracelin, analyst for Pacific Crest Securities. "There's also the question of liability for protecting the communications of parties other than the wiretap subject. They view this as a slew of privacy lawsuits waiting to happen, and they may be right."

How often Carnivore has been deployed is hard to discover, but published reports have said the system has been used 25 times since its first deployment in March.

Besides putting pressure behind this week's Congressional hearing, the Carnivore revelations have led Attorney General Janet Reno to call a study to make sure that the technology respects Constitutional rights and that the FBI is employing it in a "consistent and balanced way."