FBI should keep using e-mail snooper, report says

WASHINGTON (AP) _ A review by a private contractor of the FBI's Carnivore e-mail surveillance tool concludes that the FBI should continue to use the system, but raised the possibility that it could

Wednesday, November 22nd 2000, 12:00 am

By: News On 6

WASHINGTON (AP) _ A review by a private contractor of the FBI's Carnivore e-mail surveillance tool concludes that the FBI should continue to use the system, but raised the possibility that it could be abused to grab more data than a court allows.

The review, was posted on the Justice Department's Web site, is the result of a monthlong, $170,000 contract to provide an independent analysis of the controversial surveillance system. But some civil rights advocates and a key lawmaker accused the authors of bias.

The report, prepared by the Illinois Institute of Technology's Research Institute and Chicago-Kent College of Law, recommends that the FBI make some changes in the Carnivore program so it's easier for agents to use and less open to possible abuse.

``In the current Carnivore software,'' the report says, ``it is possible to select filter settings that may not be appropriate or even technically feasible,'' including a selection that would ``collect all information that is available on the local area network.''

Carnivore also lacks ``individual accountability,'' the authors say, because each action is not traceable to a specific FBI technician. ``Given that chain-of-custody for the collected evidence is important, it should be important to know who set up the collection and when it was set up,'' the report said.

But even with its limitations, the report said, Carnivore is more precise in allowing agents to focus on narrowly defined, specific data than off-the-shelf network monitoring software. This can prevent agents from getting more information than they're allowed under court direction, the report suggested.

Critics immediately blasted the findings and noted that several senior members of the review team have worked for the Clinton administration and federal agencies in several administrations.

``We continue to believe that this was not an independent study,'' said Barry Steinhardt, associate director of the American Civil Liberties Union. ``Most of the truly independent institutions declined to bid for the contract.

Calling the review a ``fuzzy snapshot of Carnivore,'' Steinhardt noted that Carnivore's technology is constantly evolving, so that new versions may have more sweeping capabilities than reviewed in the study.

House Majority Leader Dick Armey, R-Texas, a longtime Carnivore critic, called the findings ``questionable'' and said the choice of the reviewers dictated the tone of the report.

Henry H. Perritt, who led the review team, shrugged off the criticism and insisted his team was independent.

``This is an old criticism,'' Perritt said in an interview Tuesday. ``We had access to whatever we wanted. ... We had some actual court orders, and we talked to people in the field who used the system and grilled them on how they go about setting it up and deploying it. ``We had ample opportunity to find out how the thing is used.''

Dr. Donald M. Kerr, head of the FBI's cybertechnology unit, said in a statement that he is ``pleased with the findings and the constructive recommendations'' in the report, and that the review should help the public have a ``clearer understanding of the facts'' of Carnivore.

The report also recommended that the FBI ``work toward public release of Carnivore source code,'' the internal blueprints of the system.

And the reviewers shed light on the Carnivore's sister programs, Packeteer and CoolMiner, which are used to analyze the data collected by Carnivore. Collectively, the three programs are referred to as the ``DragonWare Suite.''