Carnivore
The Carnivore ( lat. Meat eater ) project is an extremely controversial project of the American Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the aim of which is to monitor the mail and online behavior of Internet users for criminal activities.
According to many experts and laypeople, Carnivore is the 3rd evolutionary stage of the FBI's monitoring mechanisms for online traffic , followed by projects such as Omnivore and Etherpeek (the latter is commercial software that was adapted for the FBI).
In the late 1990s, the second stage, Project Omnivore, a method to monitor specific Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and the mail traffic via their servers and to read suspicious packets or mails, began.
1999 Omnivore was terminated in favor of Carnivore, because the FBI with the Carnivore program had better possibilities to monitor the traffic of the ISPs in general without having to go into specific servers. According to information from Internet sources [evidence?] Carnivore is said to be part of the DragonWare suite, a three-part program package that includes, among other things, very sophisticated packet sniffers and data analysis systems.
In the meantime, the Carnivore system has been given the more harmless designation "DCS1000" (DCS = Digital Collection System) by the FBI.
The FBI admitted to the US Congress that it had no longer used its self-developed Carnivore during the 2002 and 2003 fiscal years. Instead, the FBI resorted to unspecified commercial products.
Web links
- Operation (English)
Individual evidence
- ↑ * Heise-Newsticker January 2005: FBI does not use the "Carnivore" surveillance system