enjamin Franklin, the first electric performance artist, wrote that those who "give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." As the debate over the balancing of personal freedom and public safety heats up, Alex Galloway has begun a computer-art project that provides food for thought.

Mr. Galloway, a New York artist, calls his project "Carnivore." It is inspired by, of all things, the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Internet- surveillance program, also known as Carnivore. Both are electronic-wiretap systems that monitor Internet traffic, including e-mail messages and other digital transmissions.

Those fearful of the F.B.I.'s Carnivore, which requires a court order for use, say they worry that it will accidentally snoop on ordinary citizens during its search for information about terrorists, racketeers and other shadowy characters, a practice that Mr. Galloway said he did not oppose.

Mr. Galloway's artwork is independent of the federal digital-surveillance program, yet it functions in much the same way. But he takes his data from volunteers, and his program generates art, not suspects. Rather than sifting the flow of data — which might include personal, potentially sensitive material like Web- page contents and chat-session exchanges — in a quest for clues, Mr. Galloway's program converts the electronic information into vibrant images and sounds. By digesting the data and spitting out art instead of incriminating evidence, his "Carnivore" defangs the threat of electronic-privacy violations.

A year in the making, Mr. Galloway's "Carnivore" has gained unintended resonance in the wake of the terrorist attacks. Federal officials are calling for a broader use of the F.B.I.'s system, which has been innocuously renamed DCS-1000. Meanwhile privacy advocates are urging caution, saying that more federal monitoring will encroach upon civil liberties without assuring public safety.

The digital medium allows the rapid creation and immediate distribution of online art. Works responding to the tragedy have already started to appear on the Internet, just as they did in 1999 during the Balkans conflict. But despite the apparent topicality of "Carnivore," Mr. Galloway insisted that he and his collaborators never meant it to be seen as a lightning rod for criticism of the F.B.I.'s system, even though his project seems to undercut the concept of covert surveillance by conducting it openly and prettifying what is unearthed.

"In fact it's a pro-surveillance art work," Mr. Galloway said in a recent telephone interview. "We're making this project because we like surveillance, because we recognize that four out of five computer-art projects need data at their core. Data is the oil paint for digital art, and we've figured out a really good data collection system."

Developed by the Radical Software Group, Mr. Galloway's loose affiliation of a dozen programming- savvy artists, "Carnivore" has two basic parts. The first is the surveillance system itself, a custom-designed computer loaded with software that monitors data flowing through a network. Like the F.B.I. system, the computer is connected to a particular location, like a cybercafe or a museum.

" `Carnivore' is a site-specific installation," Mr. Galloway said. "It's just that the installation is on a network rather than in a room or a stairway. And each network is going to have its own personality." For instance a museum's network might be filled with huge image files.

At that stage, though, the data are still in raw form, dollops of digital paint on a palette awaiting the artist's brush. Here the second part of "Carnivore" emerges. Mr. Galloway has invited his collaborators to create individual software programs that while using the same data stream will simultaneously filter and transform it according to their own artistic visions.

Six different programs have been written, with more planned. Lucas Kuzma of San Francisco builds a triangle for each data source and then maps its connections in a three-dimensional space that resembles a chart of constellations against a twilight sky. Tom Betts of London has chosen to turn the data into pure sound, a thrum of blips and hums.

"Carnivore" requires a public exhibition and cannot be viewed online, mostly because the huge amount of network data it monitors would be nearly impossible to send to remote viewers. Mr. Galloway has been running "Carnivore" in the SoHo office of Rhizome.org, a new-media art resource, for which he is director of content and technology. He said he was talking to several institutions about displaying it, but he must find one willing to risk airing its private bits and bytes.

An important element of the project, Mr. Galloway said, is that the "Carnivore" software will be made freely available to anyone who wants it. If the F.B.I.'s system is employed covertly and its results rarely divulged except in court, his version will be entirely accessible, in terms of both the software code and its artistic results.

It is easy to interpret this approach as a repudiation of the F.B.I.'s system and electronic surveillance in general. For instance, Mark Loveless, who operates a well- known online laboratory for computer security under his hacker handle, Simple Nomad, said he was delighted by the sound of Mr. Galloway's project.

Mr. Loveless said: "The F.B.I.'s Carnivore runs on a closed system, is surrounded by controversy and quite possibly violates personal rights of others during usage. The new `Carnivore' runs on a free system, is surrounded by openness and is quite possibly churning out beautiful works of art. Out of ugliness arises beauty. Out of oppression arises hope."

As the debate expands over the need for increased electronic surveillance, Mr. Loveless said, it is crucial that the public be exposed to these messages.

But Mr. Galloway, 27, said his goals were different. "This artwork existed long before Sept. 11, and it will exist long after Sept. 11," he said. As surveillance and privacy surface as significant issues, he wants to shine a light on them, he added, and one way to do that is to give this power to regular computer users.

"If people want to set up these kinds of surveillance systems, this is one way they can do it," he said. "Obviously it's not going to foil a conspiracy. But it's going to allow real people to have access to the surveillance tools that saturate their world."

He continued: "It's a tough step. Nobody wants Big Brother looking over their shoulder. I think of `Carnivore' as a dominatrix for the digital generation. It's a punishment that you willfully participate in. And you realize at the end of the day that because you can control how it's done, it's a little better than being afraid of it."

Or as Ben Franklin might have said, giving up some essential safety might lead to some permanent liberty.