WASHINGTON -- The Federal Bureau of Investigation declined to give Congress details of its Carnivore Internet surveillance system, telling a member of a House oversight committee that some of the documents he requested include classified information and others are the subject of a pending lawsuit seeking their release.
In a letter Wednesday to Rep. Bob Barr (R., Ga.), who has introduced a bill to make it harder for the FBI to use Carnivore, the bureau wrote that it is "not presently in a position" to provide documents he requested. "There remains substantial public misunderstanding and misinformation about the system," wrote John Collingwood, assistant director for FBI public affairs.
Barr declined to comment on the letter. He serves on the House Judiciary subcommittee that held hearings last month to investigate Carnivore, specialised software that the FBI can use to monitor Internet traffic and capture e-mail and other electronic communications from a criminal suspect or terrorist. Critics have complained that the system makes it easy to capture e-mail from innocent citizens using the same Internet provider as those under surveillance.
Private analysis
To reassure critics, the Justice Department may give Carnivore's blueprints to an academic institution for private analysis.
Attorney General Janet Reno is expected to disclose additional details Thursday, but the Justice Department has been negotiating such a review with the University of California at San Diego's Supercomputing Center, said Tom Perrine, the center's manager of security technologies.
Perrine said top security experts nationwide have volunteered to participate in such a review. "Carnivore is not the evil echelon that people think it is. There is so much misinformation out there," he said.
In its letter to Rep. Barr, the FBI said it was "confident that [independent testing] will be achieved in the coming weeks."
Laws predate Internet
Perrine said that part of the FBI's challenge with using Carnivore is conducting Internet wiretaps under U.S. laws that predate the Internet. "Carnivore is probably the best program and the most privacy-protective program that [the FBI] could have written given the lack of guidance in law from Congress," he said.
People familiar with the matter said the government still is deciding on the scope of any such review, such as whether the panel will be asked to look into legal or public-policy questions surrounding the wiretap-software's use.
"The system changes," said Peter Neumann, principal scientist at the SRI International Computer Science Laboratory, a Menlo Park, Calif., research organisation. "You may have looked at a snapshot of the system at one particular time, and you won't know how the system evolved."
In its letter, the FBI said "Our main concern remains that the public is not adequately informed about the very real risks to public safety and national security if simple technology can be used by criminals and terrorists to defeat the ability of law enforcement to collect often 'time sensitive' evidence."
