http://www.sjmercury.com/svtech/reports/gmsv/
>From today's 'Good Morning Silicon Valley':
FBI unearths sequel to Orwell's 1984: Privacy advocates are outraged over
the FBI's deployment of a high-speed e-mail search technology called
Carnivore which can scan massive amounts of data for e-mail messages from
criminal suspects. Federal investigators -- who claim to have used the
system in fewer than 100 cases since it debuted a year ago -- showed the
technology to industry specialists in Washington a few weeks ago in the
hopes of fostering an industry consensus on a standard for monitoring all
digital communications. Marcus Thomas, chief of the FBI's Cyber Technology
Section at Quantico, described Carnivore as nothing more than a "very
specialized sniffer." Privacy advocates, predictably, see the technology
as wide open to abuse. Said Mark Rasch, a former federal computer-crimes
prosecutor, "It's the electronic equivalent of listening to everybody's
phone calls to see if it's the phone call you should be monitoring."
