Robert Cringely asks perhaps the most thought-provoking question about the FBI’s new Carnivore system: “why the box?“

Good question. Carnivore is supposedly designed to be a sniffer, checking all inbound and outbound packets and forwarding those from badguys to the Feds. Um, guess what, people… routers do this all the time. That’s what routers do: look at packets and decide where they go. As Cringely says, “adding the Carnivore task is a simple matter of blind copying every packet to or from a bad guy to a third address at the J. Edgar Hoover FBI Building in Washington, DC. It’s at most a few lines of code and requires no additional hardware. ”

Thus there is no point in adding secondary hardware right past the router. As in telephone wiretaps, the burden could easily be placed upon the ISP, requiring them to perform the sniffing for the Feds. Cringely, however, sees a different, much more frightening, reason for wanting Carnivore installed in the nation’s ISPs:

_From a network architecture standpoint, the best location for Carnivore is right after the
ISP’s router. This puts Carnivore in the path of every packet entering or leaving the ISP. It’s
also a major reason why ISPs might not want to install Carnivore boxes — it’s the network’s point
of greatest vulnerability. In this position, Carnivore can act as a listening and recording device,
OR IT CAN ACT AS A SWITCH. If we ever hear a proposal from the FBI in which it plans to
install Carnivores at all 6000 ISPs in the U.S., we’ll be giving the government the power to do
something it can’t do right now.

Shut the Internet down.

As I’ve said, this is some scary stuff. For those of you who live in Alabama, I urge you to call your Senators regarding this matter.
Sen. Jeff Sessions: (202) 224-4124
Sen. Richard Shelby: (202) 224-5744