During the 19th century, thousands of men took to the seas to hunt for whales. The indigenous peoples of the Arctic practiced whaling for several millennia before that. Technological change and changes in mores have reduced the whaling industry to a heavily regulated shadow of what it used to be. But it hasn’t disappeared altogether. Even now, at the dawn of the 21st century, ships prowl the seas in search of a spout or a gigantic fin. A few months ago, Outside magazine published an account of a whale hunt aboard the Norwegian ship Sofie.
posted by jason's_planet on Oct 23, 2006 - 21 comments

Carnivore, the gold standard for conspiracy theory, has apparently been mothballed. An interesting element of this is that Carnivore has been removed from service not because it is invasive of civil liberties, but rather because it has failed to perform against commercially-available monitoring technologies. Of course, since we do not know what those technologies *are*, it may be that they have built into them considerations of individual rights to privacy that Carnivore could not be altered to respect. However, given the drift of the US on matters of data privacy, this seems unlikely... So, what are the programmes that do it better than Carnivore? What do they have to offer that Carniviore doesn't, or is it just the ISPs are now offering information straight to the government? And does this mean that it is no longer fashionable to append long strings of exciting-sounding nouns to emails? (Apologies if this is old news to the more plugged-in - this report has only just been released under FOI)
posted by tannhauser on Jan 16, 2005 - 27 comments

Carnivore. Webcam. Sniffing.
posted by modernsquid on Dec 7, 2004 - 12 comments

Silly carnivores, bunnies are for eating!
posted by NortonDC on Oct 6, 2004 - 40 comments

No Carnivore? No Osama evidence "The FBI destroyed evidence gathered in an investigation involving bin Laden's network after its e-mail wiretap system mistakenly captured information to which the agency was not entitled. The FBI technical person was apparently so upset that he destroyed all the e-mail take, including the take on" the suspect, the memo said". Another example of the need for significant FBI reform?
posted by matteo on May 28, 2002 - 12 comments

Carnivore and other forms of snooping approved by congress there has been some references to what this articles deals with but this gives a slightly broader perspectve.
posted by Postroad on Sep 15, 2001 - 1 comment

48 hours of wiretap without a court order? Sure, according to the Senate. Carnivore installations on the rise and the recent call to control crypto software are exactly what we don't need. This is probably just the beginning.
posted by skallas on Sep 14, 2001 - 4 comments

The ACLU wants to protect your privacy from government electronic surveillance programs like Echelon and Carnivore. Their full page ad in today's NYT claims 4th amendment rights are being violated by the US government, which is overstepping their bounds, and nearly free of up-to-date laws. Is it to late or can anything be done to protect civilian electronic communication?
posted by mathowie on Apr 15, 2001 - 7 comments

Carnivore sucks. You think so, but did you know that Steve Bellovin, Matt Blaze, Peter G Neumann and Gene Spafford agree with you? Along with David Farber from UPenn, they were asked to identify specific areas of concern by the Chief Scientist at Justice for review by a team from the Illinois Institute or Technology's Research Insititute. They weren't real impressed with the quality of the report that team returned.
posted by baylink on Dec 5, 2000 - 2 comments

Roll your own Carnivore. A network security firm has released its own software package to duplicate the abilities of the FBI's packet-sniffing black box. Or at least, its admitted abilities.
posted by harmful on Sep 21, 2000 - 0 comments

Apparently, we're not the *only* ones who may think that Louis Freeh needs a new job.
posted by baylink on Jul 24, 2000 - 1 comment

It is time for Louis Freeh to lose his job. Carnivore, indeed. This has got to stop.
posted by baylink on Jul 16, 2000 - 10 comments

Fresh net-privacy hell.
posted by aflakete on Jul 11, 2000 - 12 comments