Group topic: Internet wiretapping and Carnivore

Please look at the information on finishing and turning in papers.

Topic for today

This week's topic is Carnivore. Carnivore is a computer system used by the FBI to monitor an individual's Internet activity during the course of an investigation. Since its inception, the system has come under fire from privacy advocates, who claim Carnivore violates the Fourth Amendment.

Our presentation will lay out the legal, technical and policy issues that concern Carnivore. We hope to give you relevant background on Carnivore and to present our ideas of what should be done with the system.

To be prepared for Thursday's class, please visit the websites we have outlined below.

• US Telecom vs. FCC, D.C. Cir. 99-1442 (August 15, 2000). In this ruling (section III), the Federal Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia held that wiretap requests for packet data containing both routing information and content must meet the highest legal standards for wiretaps, even if the government claims it was interested only in the routing information in the packet headers.

• For an understanding of wiretap laws in the digital age, please browse through the James X. Dempsey paper, Communications Privacy in the Digital Age: Revitalizing the Federal Wiretap Laws to Enhance Privacy
  http://www.cdt.org/publications/lawreview/1997albany.shtml

• The only report based on first-hand knowledge of the actual system: (Skim through, but focus on the Executive Summary and Section 5: Recommendations)
  http://www-swiss.ai.mit.edu/classes/6.805/articles/wiretapping/carniv_final.pdf

• Assistant Director of the FBI Donald M. Kerr testifies about Carnivore:
  http://www.house.gov/judiciary/kerr0724.htm

• Associate Director of the ACLU Barry Steinhardt testifies about Carnivore:
  http://www.aclu.org/congress/l072400a.html

• Center for Democracy and Technology Staff Counsel Alan B. Davidson weighs in on the issue and recommends open source:
  http://www.cdt.org/testimony/000724davidson.shtml

• Carnivore is very much in the news. Here is a recent news story about Carnivore on CNN.
  http://www.cnn.com/2001/TECH/internet/05/04/internet.eavesdropping.ap/index.html

• The Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution.

• Olmstead vs. United States, 277 U.S. 438 (1928). This was an early rejection by the Supreme Court of Fourth Amendment rights in telephone conversations on the grounds that wiretaps do not constiute a physical search, and nothing is actually seized.

• Katz v. United States, 389 U.S. 347 (1967). This decision effectively reversed Olmstead and established a reasonable right of privacy in electronic communications, on the grounds that "the Fourth Amendment protects people, not places."

• The wiretapping chapter in "Ben Franklin's Web Site" (pp. 153 - 192).

You might also want to browse the project resource page for this topic.