o a wiretap that can monitor all of the phone companys customers. They believe citizens should not trust that CARNIVORE will be used to only monitor criminals, but could be abused and used to randomly monitor anyones messages and travels on the internet. In the Electronic Privacy Information Centers article, EPIC reports that the physical CARNIVORE system (there are 20 in existence at present) could reliably capture and archive all unfiltered traffic to the internal hard drive. The CARNIVORE system uses a 300Mhz PII with 384mg of RAM that has a Zip and Jaz drive which are both capable of being updated daily by the FBI, or other law enforcement officials. To address these concerns over privacy, the Justice Department has ordered an independent review of CARNIVORE by the Illinois Institute of Technology. The review was scheduled to be completed on November 17, 2000 but the report has not been made pubic. EPIC received their information only after filing a Freedom of Information lawsuit against the Justice Department and continues to urge the public not to trust a system that is entrenched in such secrecy. They urge the public to demand that the Justice Department fully disclose how CARNIVORE operates. To date, the FBI has used CARNIVORE 25 times, with 10 incidents involving national security and 6 domestic criminal cases. There have been no court cases yet to use data from CARNIVORE for evidence so the FBI has been tight-lipped regarding the data collected. This secrecy, of course, fuels the controversy. Other concerns regarding CARNIVORE include:1. Is CARNIVORE hacker-proof (is the information collected protected from unauthorized access?2. Does the software violate freedom of speech?3. Will CARNIVORE disrupt the ISPs network?These questions will be answered when the IIT report is released. In the interim, CARNIVORE definitely has the potential to be abused by law enforcement officials. The warnings of ALCU a...
