FBI'S SYSTEM TO COVERTLY SEARCH E-MAIL RAISES PRIVACY, LEGAL ISSUES

WASHINGTON, July 11 - The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation
is using a superfast system called Carnivore to covertly search
e-mails for messages from criminal suspects.

ESSENTIALLY A PERSONAL COMPUTER stuffed with specialized software,
Carnivore represents a new twist in the federal government's
fight to sustain its snooping powers in the Internet age. But in
employing the system, which can scan millions of e-mails a second, the
FBI has upset privacy advocates and some in the computer industry.
Experts say the system opens a thicket of unresolved legal issues and
privacy concerns.

The FBI developed the Internet wiretapping system at a special agency
lab at Quantico, Va., and dubbed it Carnivore for its ability to get
to "the meat" of what would otherwise be an enormous
quantity of data. FBI technicians unveiled the system to a roomful of
astonished industry specialists here two weeks ago in order to steer
efforts to develop standardized ways of complying with federal
wiretaps. Federal investigators say they have used Carnivore in fewer
than 100 criminal cases since its launch early last year.

Word of the Carnivore system has disturbed many in the Internet
industry because, when deployed, it must be hooked directly into
Internet service providers' computer networks. That would give
the government, at least theoretically, the ability to eavesdrop on
all customers' digital communications, from e-mail to online
banking and Web surfing.

The system also troubles some Internet service providers, who are
loath to see outside software plugged into their systems. In many
cases, the FBI keeps the secret Carnivore computer system in a locked
cage on the provider's premises, with agents making daily visits
to retrieve the data captured from the provider's network. But
legal challenges to the use of Carnivore are few, and judges'
rulings remain sealed because of the secretive nature of the
investigations.

Internet wiretaps are conducted only under state or federal judicial
order, and occur relatively infrequently. The huge majority of
wiretaps continue to be the traditional telephone variety, though U.S.
officials say the use of Internet eavesdropping is growing as everyone
from drug dealers to potential terrorists begins to conduct business
over the Web.

The FBI defends Carnivore as more precise than Internet wiretap
methods used in the past. The bureau says the system allows
investigators to tailor an intercept operation so they can pluck only
the digital traffic of one person from among the stream of millions of
other messages. An earlier version, aptly code-named Omnivore, could
suck in as much as to six gigabytes of data every hour, but in a less
discriminating fashion.

Still, critics contend that Carnivore is open to abuse.

Mark Rasch, a former federal computer-crimes prosecutor, said the
nature of the surveillance by Carnivore raises important privacy
questions, since it analyzes part of every snippet of data traffic
that flows past, if only to determine whether to record it for police.

"It's the electronic equivalent of listening to
everybody's phone calls to see if it's the phone call you
should be monitoring," Mr. Rasch said. "You develop a
tremendous amount of information."

Others say the technology dramatizes how far the nation's laws
are lagging behind the technological revolution. "This is a
clever way to use old telephone-era statutes to meet new challenges,
but clearly there is too much latitude in the current law," said
Stewart Baker, a lawyer specializing in telecommunications and
Internet regulatory matters.

Robert Corn-Revere, of the Hogan & Hartson law firm here, represented
an unidentified Internet service provider in one of the few legal
fights against Carnivore. He said his client worried that the FBI
would have access to all the e-mail traffic on its system, raising
dire privacy and security concerns. A federal magistrate ruled against
the company early this year, leaving it no option but to allow the FBI
access to its system.

"This is an area in desperate need of clarification from
Congress," said Mr. Corn-Revere.

"Once the software is applied to the ISP, there's no check
on the system," said Rep. Bob Barr (R., Ga.), who sits on a
House judiciary subcommittee for constitutional affairs. "If
there's one word I would use to describe this, it would be
'frightening."'

Marcus Thomas, chief of the FBI's Cyber Technology Section at
Quantico, said Carnivore represents the bureaua's effort to keep
abreast of rapid changes in Internet communications while still
meeting the rigid demands of federal wiretapping statutes. "This
is just a very specialized sniffer," he said.

He also noted that criminal and civil penalties prohibit the bureau
from placing unauthorized wiretaps, and any information gleaned in
those types of criminal cases would be thrown out of court. Typical
Internet wiretaps last around 45 days, after which the FBI removes the
equipment. Mr. Thomas said the bureau usually has as many as 20
Carnivore systems on hand, "just in case."

FBI experts acknowledge that Carnivorea's monitoring can
be stymied with computer data such as e-mail that is scrambled using
powerful encryption technology. Those messages still can be captured,
but law officers trying to read the contents are "at the mercy
of how well it was encrypted," Mr. Thomas said.

Most of the criminal cases where the FBI used Carnivore in the past 18
months focused on what the bureau calls "infrastructure
protection," or the hunt for hackers, though it also was used in
counterterrorism and some drug-trafficking cases.