"Carnivore" is it a myth?

Factual Questions
1

Hello All,
I have a good friend who is a somewhat conspiracy nut (think Dale Gribble type from King of the Hill). He truly believes that the government is operating a computer surveillance program called “Carnivore”. He claims that this “program” is able to monitor ALL voice communication in the US and it listens for key words that would indicate terrorist or whatever organization the government has in it’s sights at the moment. Now, because I am such a good friend I like to mess with him every time I call so during our conversations I will randomly throw out words like “bomb”, “white house”, “Washington DC”, “nuclear” and such. Every time I do this he goes into and absolute panic and swears that the FBI will be at our doors any day now. Of course they haven’t and I know they aren’t going to be, but it is loads of entertainment for me (and yes, maybe it is slightly mean on my part:D)

The mushy material in my head tells me that there is no way that the Government could accomplish this task on the scale that he claims they can. I don’t think there is enough computing power available to do it. Secondly I was a telephone tech for 10 years with BellSouth. That means that I spent my fair share of time in Central Offices and know that there is no Government listening equipment installed on the trunk lines at your local phone company. That would be the logical place to install such a system.

Now, I am not saying that the government doesn’t have computers that can listen for certain words or phrases and that technology can’t be used to listen in on selected pre-determined lines. I just don’t think that there is any way in God’s green earth that they have the ability to monitor all or even a 1/4 of all the phone calls made in the US. Carnivore is bunk, right? Or should I make tea and cookies for the men in dark suits and sunglasses?

2

No* person* needs to listen, they just have a computer listen. Just like today, a recruiter just has a bot sweep thru a pile of resume, looking for certain keywords and phrases. Ya think if a recruiter can do that, the gov’t can’t?

They do “listen” on certain international calls, this was brought out some time ago. I don;t know about domestic calls.

3

Software by that name exists, but I assume he’s been too paranoid to check Wikipedia.

4

I can’t see the technical capacity, or more importantly the the bandwidth being available to monitor ALL communications. The amount of data that would have to be accessed captured and processed is orders of magnitude beyond the capacity of any existing data processing system.

I’m sure this can easily be done on limited scales, but to think everything moving across all lines of communication in the US in analyzed is absurd.

5

I agree that they can listen to the calls and flag certain words using a computer program. But my BS meter is going off when he is claiming that they have the technology to listen to every single call made in the US at all times. You are talking about a country with 307 Million people in it. Even at one call a day that is a staggering number. The processing power would be mind boggling. No matter what the Straigh Dope is, I will foster his belief that it is real so I can continue entertaining myself.

And BTW, the story about my friend is not an exaggeration. He is a great guy with this one quirk. I wish I could have recorded our phone call about my daughters 5th or 6th birthday party about the time of the second Gulf War. I kept telling him over and over that she was having “yellow cake” at the party and I swear I could hear his blood pressure rising each time I said that phrase! Good times, good times!

6

I saw some sort of news segment on how all overseas calls are monitored in such a way. I really don’t see why all calls would not be subject to the same procedures if there are enough resources. Once they eliminate all the little girls talking about other little girls in two hour phone calls.

It would be even easier to do that with emails that are already digitized.

I’ve often suspected that folding@home is at least in part a government front for such spying. Petaflops of data constantly being analyzed.

7

Sounds as if your friend has conflated ECHELON ( ECHELON - Wikipedia ) with warrantless wiretapping.

8

Do you have any idea how incredibly hard that would be to pull off? You’d need to buy off every computer programmer and every biologist in the world.

9

At some point however, a person does have to listen and if you’re talking about a calls being monitored randomly the software would probably flag up countless innocuous calls for every single viable threat it uncovered. Are there people who spend their working days reviewing calls making sure that a person said “Wow LeBron is da bomb!” and not “I placed the bomb in the suitcase.”? I’m not saying there aren’t, I’m just curious.

10

This looks to be the state of the art:

Your friend isn’t totally wrong…

11

Wouldn’t listening in to the entire US population be just a little, well, unconstitutional, or is such a notion outmoded in the brave new world of the eternal war on terrorism?

12

There going to get 99% of the results listening to just 1% of the conversations, which they do via computer. They profile circuits, routes, etc (esp international) and these systems/software set up by acoustic experts which are far more complicated than I can explain do the grunt work, but there is considerable human analysis, too.

There are some technology companies physically based around MIT that have developed things for sub warfare (one of them has a mock up of full-scale soviet subs in a tank), telco, and an array of other uses that can even detect dialects… and doing that can really, really reduce the am’t of noise one needs to filter as they can zone in on very specific types of calls.

Listening to all calls? They don’t even need to do that.

Gotta run. Some dude in a black overcoat is at my door…

13

Also they would have to monitor them in Arabic, Farsi (Persian) and hordes of other languages. As far as the constitution, ha. Look at the latest bill authorizing indefinite incarceration without a hearing.

14

Large backbone ISPs and telecommunications companies in the USA have rooms where they have allowed the NSA and other intelligence agencies to tap into lines and install who knows what.

15

Even 20 years ago, according to a book by a fellow fired from he CSE, the NSA was lending Canadian intelligence (??) devices that would listen into a microwave tower and decode all the phone conversations going by. This was hooked to a recorder that would do the keyword search and record conversations if any keyword was triggered.

The issue is that it is illegal to spy on US citizens within the USA, because of the constitutional rights involved; although that apparently did not deter some previous administrations. So the grey areas were situations like a long distance call between the USA and outside; of course, if the NSA is forbidden, they pass on the equipment to Canada’s CSE, MI6, Mossad or some other cooperative agency who will pass on what they find. (For interrogation, there’s always Syria…)

I do agree though, the processing power to deal with every shred of traffic must be enormous, welll beyond what’s practical. But… do you need to? I suspect they have high-level tools to eliminate various calls well before the need to do speech analysis. Build a database of suspect persons, areas, etc. - for example, a long distance call from a pay-phone is more suspicious. Cell phones re tagged by identifying numbers, you can build a database of which ones are suspicious or new… Certain neighbourhoods are more likely to contain suspicious ethnicities, etc.

I bet every call into Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia or that area is monitored. Similarly, I bet many calls to Mexico or South America are; the other thing they can do is keep a database of who called who, which they apparently did to catch bin Laden. Once you identify an interesting cell phone, you then see where else it called, and from what tower. They may even have the conversation recorded to review later, even if it’s not flagged (like the security videos in stores, where it is overwritten a month later if you don’t flag it.) There is a tremendous amount of value in having complete historical data.

Even if you encrypt your conversation or data, I suspect that encrypted data sticks out like a sore thumb. Perhaps their worst nightmare is where everything becomes encrpted and they can’t pick out the unusual messages.

If there is software that picks out keywords, I suspect the tech is like spam filtering; one mention of yellowcake or Mossad will not set off alarm bells, it just moves the conversation from a 0 to a 1 on the 0-100 scale. How many keywords, what the database says about the originating or destination numbers, language chosen, time of day or ethnicity of locations even, frequency of calls - if you had to design a program to do this - what would you pick on?

16

I think it would be quite feasable to process this amount of information. For example, every video uploaded to YouTube is compared against a huge database of copyrighted material.

Bandwidth would be the big problem, and it would require a vast conspiracy on the part of the Telco’s to send all of their voice traffic to government servers or to host them as part of their network. That’s what makes this myth utterly implausable.

17

Back in 2000 or so, I was working in a Network Operations Center for SBC. I was given a package to review that laid out the logistics for providing governmental back door access to our 5ESS telephone switches. I don’t remember the name “Carnivore”, but it was the same general idea. I wasn’t involved in any of the actual implementation work, so I don’t know what became of the project.

18

I think “utterly implausible” is overstating it. From the EFF:

I don’t know how the total bandwidth of all internet traffic stacks up to all voice traffic, but I’d be amazed if voice was an order of magnitude more, and not at all surprised if it was less.

19

The problem, as these posts show, is that if it would work it would be **too **successful. The number of false hits would be orders of magnitude above real hits. Somebody would have to whittle away all those false hits, and that’s what would be beyond the capacity of real people, even computer-aided.

When the ability to weed out the false hits becomes available I wouldn’t doubt that governments all over the world will try to implement it. But we’re not close to that point. Right now, the government sensibly listens in to those it already suspects and not everyone.

20

And you’ll notice, we know about that one. It’s not the case that they couldn’t implement it, just that an awful lot of people in the Telco industry would know, and whistle-blowing is very easy in the age of the internet.