FBI Confirms 'Magic Lantern' Project Exists. And Carnivore gets renamed DCS1000

By Elinor Mills Abreu

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) Dec 12, 2001 - An FBI spokesman confirmed on Wednesday that the U.S. government is working on a controversial Internet spying technology, code-named ``Magic Lantern'', which could be used to eavesdrop on computer communications by "suspected criminals."

``It is a workbench project'' that has not yet been deployed, said FBI spokesman Paul Bresson. ``We can't discuss it because it's under development.''

The FBI has already acknowledged that it uses software that records keystrokes typed into a computer to obtain passwords that can be used to read encrypted e-mail and other documents as part of criminal investigations.

Magic Lantern reportedly would allow the agency to plant a Trojan horse keystroke logger on a target's PC by sending a computer virus over the Internet, rather than require physical access to the computer as is now the case.

When asked if Magic Lantern would require a court order for the FBI to use it, as existing keystroke logger technology does, Bresson said: ``Like all technology projects or tools deployed by the FBI it would be used pursuant to the appropriate legal process.''

Major anti-virus vendors this week said they would not voluntarily cooperate with the FBI and said their products would continue to be updated to detect and prevent viruses, regardless of their origin, unless there was a legal order otherwise.

Doing so would anger customers and alienate non-U.S. customers and governments, they said, adding that there had been no requests by the FBI to ignore any viruses.

While the FBI requires a court order to install its technology, formerly called ``Carnivore,'' some service providers reportedly comply voluntarily, while court orders are relatively easy to get, civil libertarians argue.

``If we were at war the government would be able to require technology companies to cooperate, I believe, in a number of ways, including getting back door access to information and computer systems.''

DOJgov.net Addendum: Details are sketchy, but Magic Lantern reportedly works by masquerading as an innocent e-mail attachment that will insert FBI spyware inside your computer.

An Associated Press article reported that "at least one antivirus software company, McAfee Corp., was contacted by the FBI ... to ensure its software wouldn't inadvertently detect the bureau's snooping software and alert a suspect."

And let's not forget Carnivore, which has been renamed DCS1000 by the FBI.

CHANGING INTERNET ARCHITECTURE TO MONITOR AND CONTROL INFORMATION

WASHINGTON AP Release October 26, 2001 — Stewart Baker, an attorney at the Washington D.C.-based Steptoe & Johnson and a former general consul to National Security Agency, said the FBI has plans to change the architecture of the Internet and route traffic through central servers that it would be able to monitor e-mail more easily.

The plans go well beyond the Carnivore e-mail-sniffing system which allows the FBI to search for and extract specific e-mails off the Internet and generated so much controversy among privacy advocates and civil libertarians before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

“From the work I’ve been doing, I’ve seen the efforts the FBI has been making and it suggests that they are going to unveil this in the next few months,” Baker said of the plan.

FBI Spokesman Paul Bresson said he was unaware of any development in the e-mail surveillance arena that would require major architectural changes in the Internet, but acknowledged that such a plan is possible.

Any new efforts would “would be in compliance with wiretapping statutes,” Bresson said. “We would be remiss if we didn’t.”

Such a move might have been unthinkable before Sept. 11.

Last year, privacy groups and civil libertarians howled in protest when the FBI trotted out plans to start using the Carnivore system. The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) in Washington was ready to go full rounds with the government in court over Carnivore, and House Majority Leader Dick Armey, R-Texas, asked Attorney General John Ashcroft to take another look at its constitutionality.

Now, though, the country is asking for more, not less, law enforcement on the Internet, and even those who once complained are coming around.

“I have two minds on this,” says Fred Peterson, vice president of government affairs for the Xybernaut Corporation, which manufactures computer technology for military and law enforcement. "The past six weeks have left little doubt in most peoples’ mind, he said, that new measures must be taken."

“I don’t think (FBI) motives are bad, but I do think they’re using people’s current state of mind – they’re using it to their advantage,” said Mikal Condon, staff attorney for EPIC.

The new FBI plans would give the agency a technical backdoor to the networks of Internet service providers’ like AOL and Earthlink and Web hosting companies, Baker said. It would concentrate Internet traffic in several central locations where e-mail and other web activity could be wiretapped [Editor's Note: and block "unfriendly" websites?].

Baker said he expects the agency will approach the Internet companies on an individual basis to ask for their help in the endeavor.

Sue Ashdown, executive director of the Washington-based American ISP Association, an Internet company trade group, said most Internet companies aren’t healthy enough financially to take on the government in court to protect their subscribers’ privacy rights. And no one, she says, wants to appear hostile to law enforcement right now.

“In the current patriotic climate, enterprises of all types will likely play along with the FBI in order to avoid a public relations disaster,” said Gene Riccoboni, an Internet attorney with the Stamford, Connecticut-based Grimes & Battersby.

The New Millennium Privacy Robbery: "Outside Review" of Carnivore (Now renamed DCS1000) by USDOJ FBI is Conducted by Insiders With Close Government Ties

Carnivore is the USDOJ FBI email snooping software being forced on companies supplying you with internet and email access. It gives the USDOJ the ability to view anything you write and send... in the interests of "saving the children" and "fighting drugs," of course.

Some House legislators suggested that the government should suspend use of the Internet surveillance tool that scoops up and reads your emails, but the Department of Justice refused.

The following are excerpts from an unencrypted government PDF file, supplying the masked names and backgrounds of the "impartial" experts who will be making decisions that affect your internet privacy. You can get the entire unencrypted PDF version (not the one censored and released by the USDOJ in September 2000) by right clicking on "Carnivore Coverup Scam" and left clicking on "save target." It can then be viewed by Adobe Acrobat.

It's no wonder that MIT refused to participate in this "impartial" review of Carnivore. They knew the fix was in... and your privacy was out. You will also note that the right of the US Department of Justice to batter your right to privacy is never in question. Only the technical aspects of this step towards growingly intrusive government is in question.

For the first time in human history, people all over the world have the ability to communicate freely. One would believe that America would stand as the bastion of defense for this golden era. But even in this great nation, our government bureaucracy is becoming increasingly arrogant and reactively paranoid. And with this growing tendency of viewing citizens as subjects of a bureaucratic realm... none of us are safe.

Homeland Security revives super-snoop

9 Mar 2007 THE WASHINGTON TIMES

Homeland Security officials are testing a super-snoop computer system that sifts through personal information on U.S. citizens to detect possible terrorist attacks, prompting concerns from lawmakers who have called for investigations.

The system uses the same data-mining process that was developed by the Pentagon's Total Information Awareness (TIA) project that was banned by Congress in 2003 because of vast privacy violations.

A Government Accountability Office (GAO) investigation of the project called ADVISE -- Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight and Semantic Enhancement -- was requested by Rep. David R. Obey, Wisconsin Democrat and chairman of the House Appropriations Committee.

he investigation focuses on whether the program violates privacy laws, and the findings will be released after completion of the Iraq war supplemental spending bill, possibly as early as this week, a panel aide said.

The ADVISE and TIA data-mining projects rely on personal data to track individual behavior and consumer transactions to develop computer algorithms that create a pattern that some behavioral scientists say can predict terrorist behavior.

Data can include credit-card purchases, telephone or Internet details, medical records, travel and banking information.

Privacy concerns prompted lawmakers on both sides of the aisle to introduce legislation in January to require that government agencies disclose data-mining practices in regular reports to Congress.
"A serious discussion on the implications of data-mining programs is long overdue," Sen. Russ Feingold, Wisconsin Democrat and a sponsor of the bill, said yesterday. Sen. John E. Sununu, New Hampshire Republican, is also a bill sponsor.

"Many Americans are understandably concerned about the idea of secret government programs analyzing their personal information. Congress needs to know more about the operational aspects and privacy implications of data-mining programs before these programs are allowed to go forward," Mr. Feingold said.

A spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security did not return a call for comment.

Congress also tucked language inside Homeland Security's spending bill in September requiring an investigation by the agency's inspector general, but allowed $40 million in funding to go forward in this year's budget.

"The ADVISE program is designed to extract relationships and correlations from large amounts of data to produce actionable intelligence on terrorists," the spending bill said. "A prototype is currently available to analysts in Intelligence and Analysis using departmental and other data, including some on U.S. citizens."
According to a Congressional Research Service (CRS) report in March 2003, TIA planned "to use data mining technologies to sift through personal transactions in electronic data to find patterns and associations connected to terrorist threats and activities."

"Recent increased awareness about the existence of the TIA project provoked expressions of concern about the potential for the invasion of privacy of law-abiding citizens by the government, and about the direction of the project by John Poindexter, a central figure in the Iran-Contra affair," the CRS report said.

"While the law enforcement and intelligence communities argue that more sophisticated information gathering techniques are essential to combat today's sophisticated terrorists, civil libertarians worry that the government's increased capability to assemble information will result in increased and unchecked government power, and the erosion of individual privacy," the report said.

ADVISE was initiated in 2003 following the demise of the TIA project.
The new system includes data-mining tools to digest "massive quantities of information from many different sources" to find "hidden relationships in the data," according to a 2004 report by Sandia National Laboratories and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory on a Homeland Security workshop that outlined this and other technology under development.

The technology is expected to analyze more than 3 million "relationships" or connections per hour, says the report, which included an example of how friends, family members, locations and workplaces can be linked by pinging the data.

Pentagon and F.B.I. Join Forces to Create Computer System That Would Expose Personal Data of Americans

DOJgov.net newswire Nov 9, 2002

According to the New York Times (Nov 9, 2002) the Pentagon is constructing a computer system that could create a vast electronic dragnet, searching for personal information as part of the hunt for terrorists around the globe — including the United States.

Vice Adm. John M. Poindexter, director of this effort, has described the system in Pentagon documents and speeches. Its alleged goal is to provide intelligence analysts and law enforcement officials with instant access to information from Internet mail and calling records to credit card and banking transactions and travel documents, without a search warrant.

Historically, military and intelligence agencies have not been permitted to spy on Americans without extraordinary legal authorization. But Admiral Poindexter, the former national security adviser in the Reagan administration, has argued that the government needs broad new powers to process, store and mine billions of minute details of electronic life in the United States.

Admiral Poindexter has described this plan in public documents and speeches, but declines to be interviewed on the subject. However, he did say that that the government needs to "break down the stovepipes" that separate commercial and government databases, allowing teams of intelligence agency analysts to hunt for hidden patterns of activity with powerful computers.

"We must become much more efficient and more clever in the ways we find new sources of data, mine information from the new and old, generate information, make it available for analysis, convert it to knowledge, and create actionable options," he said in a California speech earlier this year.

Admiral Poindexter quietly returned to the government in January to take charge of the Office of Information Awareness at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, known as Darpa. The office is responsible for developing new surveillance technologies in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks.

Prior to taking the position at the Pentagon, Admiral Poindexter, who was convicted in 1990 for his role in the Iran-contra affair, had worked as a contractor on one of the projects he now controls. Admiral Poindexter's conviction was reversed in 1991 by a federal appeals court because he had been granted immunity for his testimony before Congress about the case.

In order to deploy such a system, known as Total Information Awareness, new legislation would be needed, some of which has been proposed by the Bush administration in the Homeland Security Act that is now before Congress. That legislation would amend the Privacy Act of 1974, which was intended to limit what government agencies could do with private information.

In response to these intrusions on personal privacy, Marc Rotenberg, director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington said, "This could be the perfect storm for civil liberties in America. The vehicle is the Homeland Security Act, the technology is Darpa and the agency is the F.B.I. The outcome is a system of national surveillance of the American public."

According to a Pentagon spokesman, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld has been briefed on the project by Admiral Poindexter and the two had a lunch to discuss it.

"As part of our development process, we hope to coordinate with a variety of organizations, to include the law enforcement community," a Pentagon spokeswoman said.

An F.B.I. official, who spoke on the condition that he not be identified, said the bureau had had preliminary discussions with the Pentagon about the project but that no final decision had been made about what information the F.B.I. might add to the system.

A spokesman for the White House Office of Homeland Security, Gordon Johndroe, said officials in the office were not familiar with the computer project and he declined to discuss concerns raised by the project's critics without knowing more about it.

He referred all questions to the Defense Department, where officials said they could not address civil liberties concerns because they too were not familiar enough with the project.

Some members of a panel of computer scientists and policy experts who were asked by the Pentagon to review the privacy implications this summer said terrorists might find ways to avoid detection and that the system might be easily abused.

"A lot of my colleagues are uncomfortable about this and worry about the potential uses that this technology might be put, if not by this administration then by a future one," said Barbara Simon, a computer scientist who is past president of the Association of Computing Machinery. "Once you've got it in place you can't control it."

If deployed, civil libertarians argue, the computer system would rapidly bring a surveillance state. They assert that potential terrorists would soon learn how to avoid detection in any case while the innocent American public will be subject to constant in depth investigation and surveillance.

The new system will rely on a set of computer-based pattern recognition techniques known as "data mining," a set of statistical techniques used by scientists as well as by marketers searching for potential customers.

The system would permit a team of intelligence analysts to gather and view information from databases, pursue links between individuals and groups, respond to automatic alerts, and share information efficiently, all from their individual computers.

The project calls for the development of a prototype based on test data that would be deployed at the Army Intelligence and Security Command at Fort Belvoir, Va. Officials would not say when the system would be put into operation.

The system is one of a number of projects now under way inside the government to lash together both commercial and government data to hunt for patterns of terrorist activities.

"What we are doing is developing technologies and a prototype system to revolutionize the ability of the United States to detect, classify and identify foreign terrorists, and decipher their plans, and thereby enable the U.S. to take timely action to successfully pre-empt and defeat terrorist acts," said Jan Walker, the spokeswoman for the defense research agency.

Others, including Michael G. Leventhal, Editor and Publisher of DOJgov.net feel that in a failed effort to provide a sane mix of safety with personal liberty, the government is creating machinery to subdue the American People. "The real problem involves an unwillingness on the part of both Republicans and Democrats to control our borders.

Democrats want votes and Republicans want a source of cheap labor. Uncontrolled immigration has invited terrorists and potential Sleeper Cells into America. And a corrupt arrogant and indolent US Department of Justice Immigration and Naturalization Service has spent more time and money persecuting whistleblowers to these activities than preserving the integrity and heritage of liberty within our nation.

With a, better run and less self-serving government, none of this would be necessary. When a government can't protect its citizens, it subdues them."

	FBI Seeking Tools to Control and Censor Internet