Date: 01.06.2002
From: RSG (rsg@rhizome.org)
Subject: Carnivore News Flash #5--press update

CARNIVORE
http://rhizome.org/carnivore

News Flash #5

A quick press update... 

Wired News recently published an article on Carnivore which can be read 
here:

http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,49439,00.html

Plus, the RSG was recently interviewed for the Italian magazine 
"Internet News." An excerpt follows...

+ + +

QUESTION: ARE YOU PLANNING TO SHOW CARNIVORE IN PUBLIC SPACES?

Yes, we have a few exhibitions planned for 2002. All are for  
traditional art world spaces (galleries and museums). This is fine, 
however it is RSG's desire to show Carnivore in a cybercafe, or a 
school, or a commercial office space. The data available in these types 
of public spaces are much more interesting to us.

QUESTION: WHAT KIND OF DATA DOES THE CARNIVORE SERVER SEND TO THE 
DIFFERENT CLIENTS?

The core functionality of Carnivore is provided by "tcpdump," a freely 
available packet sniffer (which comes preinstalled on nearly all Linux 
distributions). Carnivore simply acts as a wrapper for tcpdump, taking 
the data it receives from tcpdump and serving that data over the 
Internet. Carnivore does 100% surveillance for Internet Protocol (IP) 
packets. This means that Carnivore can "see" all meaningful network 
traffic in its local network area: email messages, web pages, instant 
messages, telnet sessions, file transfers, etc. All of this data is 
streamed out to the clients. The clients then decide how they wish to 
visualize the data. 

QUESTION: WAS USING THE GPL LICENSE PART OF THE PROJECT STRATEGY FROM 
THE BEGINNING? IN WHICH WAY DO YOU THINK IT CAN ENHANCE AND/OR LIMIT THE 
CARNIVORE PROJECT?

The decision to make Carnivore Server open source is absolutely central 
to the piece. The FBI software that inspired us is a closed technology. 
The public cannot use the software themselves; they can't inspect the 
code to see how it works. So it was interesting for us to turn the FBI 
software inside out and show how easy it was to make. It can be reverse- 
engineered using preexisting tools and with almost no budget--all you 
need is a Linux computer. Now people can use the RSG software to assist 
the FBI in their wiretapping activities... or to make art, it doesn't 
matter. 

+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+
|                                            |
+     +------+                               +
|    /      /|          /------------\       |
+   +------+ |         /...internet...\      +
|   |      | |         |............+----+   |
+   | data |<--------->|............|user|   +
|   |      | |    ^    |............+----+   |
+   |      |/     |    |..............|      +
|   +------+      |    \............../      |
+                 |     \------------/       +
|                 |                          |
+            +---------+                     +
|            |CARNIVORE|                     |
+            +---------+                     +
|                                            |
+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+