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FBI Conducts "Vacuum Cleaner" Surveillance of Your Internet Communications

You have the give the FBI credit for improved public relations during President Bush's second term in office.

The reason I say that is that the agency is engaged in far more pervasive surveillance of your electronic communications than it was only a few years ago, yet its activity is drawing much less scrutiny than it did then.

Back in 2001, the FBI was headed up by the combative Louis Freeh, whose boss was the even more controversial attorney general, John Ashcroft. And, only a few months before Freeh left office in June 2001, the FBI revealed it had developed a new system to wiretap Internet communications.

If the FBI had any public relations savvy, it would have called its new Internet wiretapping system something like "Deterrence" or "Prevention." But instead, it named the system "Carnivore."

Predictably, a name like "Carnivore" got television's talking heads wagging about civil liberties in a way they hadn't in years. But contrary to early press reports, Carnivore's capabilities weren't that robust: according to an independent technical review prepared in 2000, Carnivore "accumulates no data other than that which passes its filters" and that it saves information "for later analysis only after [it's] positively linked by the filter settings to a target."

But once Robert Mueller took over as head of the FBI in September 2001, the agency became much more media savvy. Certainly, the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 muted media criticism of its surveillance efforts. But renaming Carnivore with a more neutral moniker, DCS1000, helped as well, and the talking heads went on to discuss more pressing issues.

Indeed, in 2004, the FBI retired Carnivore, rather, DCS1000. Only, it developed a still-unnamed surveillance system to replace it that's far more comprehensive than Carnivore ever was, but that has received near-zero media attention. (And why not? The Oscars are coming up!)

In what I'll call "Son-of-Carnivore," the FBI doesn't focus on a particular suspect, but assembles the activities of thousands of Internet users at a time into massive databases, which can subsequently be "data mined" for names, e-mail addresses or keywords. And, according to a presentation made last month at Stanford University's law school, Son-of-Carnivore has become the FBI's "default method" for Internet surveillance.

Son-of-Carnivore is like a vacuum cleaner, and it's designed to get around the technological hurdles that eavesdropping on Internet traffic poses. Like Carnivore, the FBI uses it only after obtaining a court order, and the Internet Service Provider on which it's served doesn't have the technical ability to isolate the targeted person or IP address (a series of numbers that can identify an individual computer).

With Son-of-Carnivore, everything—e-mail communications, Web browsing records, chat sessions, and everything else you do online—gets swept up. The FBI then searches the resulting database to retrieve the information it wants and discards what's irrelevant. Essentially, the FBI monitors everyone, and uses that information to choose its targets.

Federal law requires the FBI to do what's called "minimization" when it monitors electronic communications, even when it has a court order. The intent is to avoid the type of vacuum-cleaner surveillance that Son-of-Carnivore performs. But the FBI seems to believe that what it's doing is legal, because federal law permits agents to intercept now and analyze later if the targeted communications are "in a code or foreign language." Apparently, in the FBI's mind, Internet communications amount to a "code or foreign language."

I suspect that you'll be hearing much more about Son-of-Carnivore in the next few weeks—at least after the Oscars. In the meantime, Mueller and his newly media-savvy FBI will be doing everything possible to reassure critics that the FBI can be trusted not to misuse the data it's collecting for purposes unrelated to the original court order.

This is the same agency that considers Quaker anti-war activists and "militant vegetarians" as terrorist suspects. Trust us? Thank you, Mr. Mueller, but I don't think so. Put whatever media spin you want on Son-of-Carnivore, but I still believe it's an outrageous violation of civil liberties, not to mention the law. And I hope Congress puts a stop to it.