News reports exploded this week on the retirement of Carnivore, an FBI monitoring tool designed to be installed at an ISP to monitor criminal activity. The reality is that Carnivore was "retired" two years ago, replaced by backdoors, sweeping legal changes, and less accountability.
Estimated to have cost between six and fifteen million dollars to develop, the unit was designed to sit at the head-end of an ISP's network, collecting data packets only from surveillance targets. While the name certainly helped lend to the device's negative mythos, so did documentation on the project obtained via Freedom of Information Requests.
EPIC (Electronic Privacy Information Center) went to court to obtain FBI documents showing the unit could be easily abused, and was far less precise than promised. An independent analysis found that the unit's ability to broadly collect data with little to no accountability measures made it "constitutionally suspect".
Hoping to quell the all but ruined public image of the unit, the FBI renamed the project the less aggressive DCS1000 and lessened its profile. But recent EPIC documents show the unit hasn't been used in several years, making this week's "news" of the project's demise largely pointless.
With the invention of the Patriot Act, the application of wiretap laws to the digital realm, and the use of back-doors in consumer and enterprise gear, focusing the privacy debate on Carnivore makes little functional sense.
The Patriot Act now allows the FBI to force ISP's to hand over information without a court order, eliminating due process entirely. What's more, ISP's now are legally prohibited from alerting anyone about such requests under penalty of law. The EFF this week filed a freedom of information request to see just how much "warrant-less surveillance" is occurring.
The FBI has also convinced commercial vendors to put back doors in their hardware. MetaSwitch was one of several vendors to unveil switches with easy wiretap access embedded. Cisco has likewise been cooperative, developing their "Lawful Intercept Control" technology at the FBI's request.
The DOJ and FBI also convinced the FCC this year to rule that VoIP must adhere to traditional wiretap laws such as CALEA. Likewise they're hard at work making sure next generation fiber networks (like Verion's Fios) also comply.
And while it's not discussed much (Uncle Sam would like you to believe it falls in tin-foil beanie territory), Carnivore was a pin prick in comparison to the global surveillance axe known as Echelon - a massive monitoring network which features zero Congressional oversight.
So while the media has made quite a bit of noise this week about the death of Carnivore, Carnivore was a miniscule and outdated piece of a much larger puzzle. Carnivore did however function as a public relations lesson for Uncle Sam, whose new gathering mechanisms operate more quietly, with far less transparency and accountability.