FBI decides to outsource snooping through your e-mail

Back in 2000, a lot of personal privacy advocates were alarmed when word leaked out about "Carnivore." For those of you who may be unfamiliar with the term, it's fully as spooky as it sounds. It was an in-house software system developed by the FBI to surreptitiously snoop around in people's e-mails, computer files, web movement history, etc. Allegedly it was only supposed to be used with the permission of a judge, similar to the process for getting a phone tap.

Unfortunately, unlike phone taps (which leave a hardware trail and can be detected) there was virtually no way to tell if the system was being used in black bag operations without obtaining a court order ahead of time. There was, in the opinion of many, simply no way to tell if the agents were monitoring computer activity of whoever they chose and then simply cherry picking the results to request court orders.

Now, four years after its disclosure, the FBI is scrapping Carnivore and replacing it with "commercially available software."

[T]he FBI said it has switched to unspecified commercial software to eavesdrop on computer traffic during such investigations and has increasingly asked Internet providers to conduct wiretaps on targeted customers on the government's behalf, reimbursing companies for their costs.

The FBI performed only eight Internet wiretaps in fiscal 2003 and five in fiscal 2002; none used the software initially called Carnivore and later renamed the DCS-1000, according to FBI documents submitted to Senate and House oversight committees. The FBI, which once said Carnivore was "far better" than commercial products, said previously it had used the technology about 25 times between 1998 and 2000.

The estimated price tag on Carnivore? The spooks won't say, claiming that portions of the budget are classified. However some software experts put the price tag at somewhere between six and eleven million dollars.

So in addition to being careful what you blog, keep an eye on what you send or receive in e-mails. Big Brother is still out there watching.