Newbie Lawyer Says Carnivore is Good

What is Carnivore? I copied the answer from the EFF.org website.

Carnivore is an electronic communications surveillance system created by the FBI. It is essentially a PC that runs specialized surveillance software, attached to your ISP's network -- something like an email and web traffic wiretap. But, due to differences between Internet and telephone technologies, Carnivore exceeds FBI legal wire-tapping authority.

Some newbie lawyer who is only a couple of years out of the University of Chicago Law School published a document to the web that was pro-Carnivore. I had to comment about some of things this lawyer wrote.

Lawyer: One of the greatest innovations of the past ten years seems unfortunately to be far better suited to organizing communication among decentralized terrorist cells than to generating advertising revenue.

Me: First, the Internet is 30 years old -- not 10. Secondly, and most importantly, it has not been proven that the Internet is a key tool (weapon) for terrorists. They probably have more success communicating via our country's media outlets (tv, radio, newspapers [think classified sections], and so on).

Lawyer: We have come to see the Internet, instead, as fostering a global network of terrorists who could live among us, book their flight tickets electronically and even educate themselves online about the volume and yield of crop dusting planes.

Me: The terrorists also got educated by attending the schools in our country. Therefore, our Educational System is fostering a global network of terrorists. I teach students how to use computers; therefore, I am an enabler of terrorism. Thanks.

Lawyer: The Internet is a threat, but it can also be a tool to track down the terrorists.

Me: The Internet can track down terrorists and any other group or individual that our Government (or whatever) may have doubts about.

Lawyer: The ATA is not seeking "unparalleled" powers. Rather, it is simply seeking to allow police the same investigatory powers on the Internet as they currently have in conducting searches of communications using older mediums. Intelligence-gathering laws were written in a pre-Internet era and need to change to catch up with the use of new technologies.

Me: Here are two huge problems: 1) The legal field is just starting to get around to placing laws on the Internet and many of today's judges are not computer-literate. [and this computer ill-literacy extends to lawyers as evidenced by the fact that is this lawyer thinks the Internet is only 10 years old] 2) If the Government turns on a tool that gathers information, then given the current state of computer security (almost 25% of the webservers are running Microsoft product; and most Government workers are probably using Microsoft product on their office computers) the information gathered by the Government will probably be easily available to rest of the world (which includes the bad guys).

Lawyer: It is important to realize, too, that the use of technology in surveillance can actually help ensure that the search is focused on the speech of criminals alone and not the correspondence of innocent citizens.

Me: I need this explained to me in detail. How can you ensure that only the speech of criminals is monitored? You can't. [Especially if Microsoft product is being used.]

Lawyer: Similarly, senders of e-mail do not have a legitimate expectation of privacy regarding the identity of their recipients because third parties the ISP or e-mail provider learn that information, as most users well know.

Me: And here is where the computing community takes action: If an ISP is found to be snooping, then that ISP goes out of business because people will switch to a different ISP.

Full Text from FindLaw.com.

Author: G.D.Thurman [thurmunit@inficad.com]
Created: 12 Oct 2001