The Federal Bureau of Investigation recently announced that for the past two years it has been using a new high-tech weapon: a robot named Carnivore that spies on e-mail. Carnivore is box, essentially a single-purpose computer running specialized software. If you are under investigation, it is physically attached by the FBI to your ISP. When in place, it scans all incoming and outgoing e-mails with your name on them. It ignores everyone else's messages. Or at least that's what the FBI says. I don't believe it. Congress and the courts have gone through the motions of acting concerned. Neither were very convincing.
Carnivore is nothing but a glorified packet-sniffer, and not all that glorified, either. Any competent sysop could rig a packet-sniffer of his or her own to spy on traffic at the place where he or she works. Many undoubtedly have. The enormous profit potential must be very enticing. Blackmail pays big. So does stock trading based on insider information. Some sysops probably even sniff your packets solely for the psychosexual thrill of looking over your shoulder, so to speak, when you're surfing porn while the boss thinks you're working. As far as careers go, being a sysop is a voyeur's wet dream.
Because Carnivore has unlimited power to spy on almost everyone with an e-mail account, certain politicians and public interest lawyers purport it to be the greatest threat your digital privacy ever. If you follow current developments in digital surveillance technology, or even if you just follow my column, you know this claim is hyperbolic. D.I.R.T, B.O., van Eck, cookies, PROMIS, and Echelon got there first. That doesn't mean that Carnivore is not a threat. Carnivore is definitely a threat, and not just to the privacy of terrorists and drug dealers, either.
Drugs and terrorism are just an excuse for yet another escalation of the government's seemingly endless war against privacy, liberty, and the bill of rights. It's not even a novel excuse at that. But what if that threat is merely a diversion? The FBI revealed Carnivore to us for a reason. Perhaps the agency wants us to focus only on the program's most obvious purpose. But what about its other purposes? The violation of our inherent right to privacy is certainly not the FBI's only goal. It is merely a means to an end. The government, and the wealthy elite who own it, are primarily interested in controlling us. Spying on us is just one way to make that easier to do. It's not the only way.
Net maven Robert X. Cringely has speculated that surveillance is not the prime purpose of Carnivore. As he astutely pointed out, if all the FBI wants to do is read all your e-mail, the physical attachment of a physical box to your ISP is simply not necessary. Software alone can do the job just fine. There is, of course, a bandwidth limitation on how much traffic can be monitored solely by software running on routers. Scanning every single piece of software passing through a particular router requires robust, Echelon style, parallel processing. But the FBI has stated that Carnivore is a very specific, indeed surgical, surveillance device. It does not, so they say, read every single piece of e-mail it encounters, nor does it scan for keywords. Why then does it require a whole box and not just an application running on a router? Could it be because Carnivore has another, more sinister, purpose?
Cringely notes that the optimal physical position for Carnivore to occupy at your ISP makes it also capable of doubling as a kill switch. Consider what this implies. Carnivore can be legally installed without informing anybody except the ISP sysops, and of course they'll never tell. That means not only that could there be a Carnivore on your ISP right now and you wouldn't know it, but that there could be a Carnivore on every ISP in the country and none of us would know it. Some people at the FBI would know it, but by no means all of them. Only a handful are actually needed. Operations of this nature are always conducted by compartmentalized units. Oversight is subjected to very narrow bureaucratic bottlenecks, sometimes as narrow as a single individual.
If the FBI has already installed a Carnivore on every ISP in the country, a single command, issued remotely, could cause every single one of them of them to isolate their host ISPs from the Internet. For or all intents and purposes, the Internet would shut down, at least in this country. They wouldn't really even have to attach kill switches to 6,000 ISPs, just to the metropolitan area exchanges (MAE) and network access points (NAP) or other concentration points. This puts an enormous, some would say inordinate, amount of power into a very few hands. None of them belong to elected officials.
The Internet is a global phenomenon. Even if a single country, or even a single continent, suddenly shut down its part, the rest of the Internet would live on. But within the area shut down, communications would be severely restricted, to say the least. Combined with the government-corporate complex's control of telephone switching and broadcast, it would render the populace virtually deaf and blind. Except for personal friends who live nearby, we would all be alone. In this networked age, most people would find that psychologically disorienting. For many, it would be devastating.
But since the U.S. economy is so dependent on e-commerce, would the powers that be ever actually do something like that? It is extremely difficult to imagine anything short of FEMA-level social unrest sparking such an order. For anything less it would be like slicing a cake with a baseball bat. But shutting down a few specific ISPs for a while is quite another matter. The ability to selectively shut individual ISPs is a dramatic escalation in the ability to suppress political dissent.
Political power no longer grows solely from the barrel of a gun. Today real power is not the control of the means of production, either. Today real power is control of the means of communication. It used to be that sergeants and secretaries made the world go round. Today, it's the sysops. This is not to say that sergeants and secretaries aren't still important parts of the social-control mechanism. But the person who controls the sysops really controls the world. Try to imagine the sergeants and secretaries of the world today trying to do their jobs without a functioning Internet. Oh, a few could manage for a while, but not many, and none for long.
Our rulers want no social unrest to take place unless it is generated, and preferably led, by their own agents provocateur. A token degree of resistance is actually good for our rulers. It makes people think this is a democracy. But real grassroots organizing is a genuine threat to the power structure. As such, it provokes serious and sophisticated suppression. Today that suppression has gone high tech.
Grassroots organizing has evolved with the times too. Political dissidents of all stripes have adopted the Internet as a prime organizing tool. And what a superb tool it is. It combines all the best attributes of the phone tree with those of the underground press. Modern protests are still organized primarily by ordinary people meeting face to face in living rooms. Telephone still play a role, as does voice mail. But today e-mail, Web sites, chat rooms, IRC, and especially listservs have given modern organizers powers of communications of which we could only dream back in the '60s. Despite the endless parade of obituaries by corporate media, the spirit of the '60s is far from dead. Judging from events since the Battle of Seattle, we can only conclude that it is stronger than ever and growing fast. Blame this in part on the quantum growth in ordinary people's ability to communicate. For the first time in history our ability to coordinate mutual efforts has begun to rival that of the state. This has not gone unnoticed by the powers that be.
During the height of the Vietnam War, it was not uncommon for massive demonstrations to take place in different cities, sometimes as little as a week apart. The FBI's plan to disrupt this sort of behavior was called COINTELPRO. Techniques included disruption and outright suppression of protesters' ability to communicate with one another. It was the custom for antiwar activists to allow, indeed encourage, out of towners who had come for a demo to stay at their homes. Many a time my own floor was completely covered with the sleeping bags of out-of-town protesters. I was far from alone in this. Lists of such addresses were distributed by mail and phone. Federal agents would sometimes intercept those lists and replace them with lists of false addresses. They also distributed bogus maps and incorrect street directions. Tens, sometimes hundreds, of thousands of people would show up for a demo. The more of them who spent their time wandering the streets lost, with nowhere to go, the better the feds liked it.
The feds also used wiretaps, legal and otherwise, to monitor the conversations of local organizers. When they figured out which phones were most crucial to the demo going smoothly, they would arrange for those phones to suddenly go "out of service" a day or two before the demo, just when they were needed most. The phone company, as always in cahoots with the government, would only send out "repair crews" after the demo was over. These sorts of tactics were never a critical factor. Neither they, nor anything else the government did (and it did a lot, lot worse), was able to suppress the antiwar movement. They sure were a pain in the neck, though.
Nowadays the same tactics still work. They adapt well to modern communications technology. Shutting down the entire national communications system is a much more drastic a measure than the current degree of social unrest calls for. It would be far more trouble than it was worth. It would alienate ever more people and turn them against the power structure. It could even be the straw that breaks the camel's back. Isolating a single city, on the other hand, is a very viable tactic. So maybe Cringely is on to something after all.
But what would make this an appropriate tactic? There are a number of plausible scenarios. Here's one: Sooner or later the cops will attack a large, peaceful demo one time too often. Sooner or later people will get fed up with this crap and fight back. It's only human nature. They will initially overwhelm the police by shear force of numbers. The authorities will declare there is a terrorist threat (or some such excuse), declare martial law, and seal off the area, except for mainstream media. They will do whatever they have to do to in order to regain the upper hand. This is a given. But they probably won't want eyewitness accounts going out in real time across the Internet while they're doing it. No problem. All they have to do is to throw a few kill switches. They could even blame it on hackers – and who would know?
But the powers that be don't like to let social unrest get that far out of hand. They much prefer to nip things in the bud by micromanaging dissent as much as possible. In many cases, they could shut down a single ISP, or at most a handful of specific ISPs, and seriously impact any targeted group of grassroots organizers who have failed to develop other, diversified, multiply redundant channels of communication. Because Carnivore is specifically an e-mail monitor, listservs are particularly vulnerable. Relying on a single listserv to get the word out is not going to work in the future, not in the world of Carnivore. Have the feds found this necessary yet? Apparently not. But they sure must like having it up their sleeve.
Has the FBI told us the whole story of Carnivore? Unlikely. It would be so out of character. What else does Carnivore do? We wonder. Does it monitor entire listservs, especially "certain" ones, as a matter of routine? If you subscribe to the same listserv as does an individual under Carnivore investigation, does it also monitor you? Does it compile a list of the people you e-mail and begin to monitor them, too? What about the people they e-mail with? Does it keep track of what other ISPs you use? Where does it all end? The FBI says it ends within the limits of the law. If you think COINTELPRO is dead, that's probably good enough for you. But don't kid yourself. COINTELPRO is far from dead. And it just grew a new set of teeth.
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