September 2000 | Hightower Lowdown
Carnivore is Going to Eat Your E-mail
by Jim Hightower
J. Edgar Hoover would’ve given his pink tutu to have had such a sneaky surveillance toy as the FBI now has.
Never before have the feds been able to scoop up so much information from so many Americans so quickly and so surreptitiously. Most Americans, however, won’t be so thrilled about this development, for the FBI’s new electronic vacuum cleaner not only sucks up information — it also sucks up our constitutional right to privacy. This thing is as dangerous as its name implies: "Carnivore."
Agents say that the name was chosen because this black box of computer software literally gulps down E-mail messages, going to the "meat" of what you and I might be saying in our electronic messages. With the Carnivore system, the FBI can plug into an Internet service provider, channeling every E-mail from every customer using that provider into the FBI’s surveillance system. It gives the feds the ability to monitor who is sending E-mail to whom, and to read the content of any or all of the E-mails.
Tut-tut, says the agency, we’re only after terrorists and other "bad people," plus we have to get a court order to use Carnivore, so it’s no different than a phone tap. Well tut-tut right back at them. First, this is not a tap on a single phone line, but on entire E-mail networks — more like getting a tap on, say, Bell Atlantic, grabbing millions of lines at once. Second, once it plugs into a network, Carnivore can take any information it wants — not just the E-mails of the bad guys. And, by the way, who gets to define "bad guys?" The FBI itself, of course, and this is not an agency with a reassuring record of self-restraint.
Not to worry, though — the agency is already responding to public outrage: It plans to change the name of Carnivore to something less menacing.
Jim Hightower is a columnist and author. To subscribe to The Hightower Lowdown, send $15, and your name, and address to: Lowdown, P.O. Box 20596, New York, NY 10011. Visit his web site for more info.
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