As the furor grows over the FBI's Carnivore program to analyze packet flows at Internet service providers' points of presence, one is tempted to ask civil liberties organizations, "Just what did you think 'Layer 7 awareness' meant?" The FBI, in deploying equipment that sniffs both the headers and data payloads of packets, is following a trail already trod by e-commerce companies and the CIOs of large corporations.
That does not in any way excuse the attempts by the federal government to browbeat ISPs into accepting all forms of snooping equipment at network nodes. EE Times has argued against the core assumptions of the 1994 Communications Assistance to Law Enforcement Act (CALEA). If a federal agency is going to test the edges of civil liberties abuse, it should do so solely within the confines of its own budget and not seek to mandate the participation of private industry in violating civil liberties, a condition CALEA demands.
A bigger problem with CALEA is the requisite installation of equipment at central offices and points of presence-a physically intrusive act that feels more threatening than the passive monitoring conducted by e-commerce companies. If monitoring requires dedicated hardware (or even software agents) at every network node, does an intelligence agency really have the right to make such equipment a regular part of the next-generation Internet?
But the showstopper for government agencies, as the FBI and National Security Agency bleat in closed sessions of Congress, is that intelligence organizations lag private industry in their understanding of Internet Protocol networks. Whitfield Diffie of Sun Microsystems warns that the public should take such complaints with a grain of salt, since the volume tends to rise during the budget talks.
If the descriptions of the Carnivore server are accurate, the system sounds like the bandwidth shapers and Web redirectors that can be purchased through any reseller and augmented with a few policy-management embedded software modules that similarly are common on the open market. The FBI could ask data-mining ad agencies like DoubleClick about the experience of setting up seven-layer traffic analysis.
All too often, laws like CALEA are created that assume the best of intentions on the part of the folks in charge. If we instead assume that all institutions-from intelligence agencies looking for bad guys to private companies seeking to sell us toys-may have sinister intentions for technology application, we can set preemptive public policies accordingly.
Loring Wirbel is EE Times' managing editor for the communications beat and author of the 'Dataport' column.
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