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[infowar.de] Washington Post 23.7.01: House Passes Legislation Requiring Carnivore Report
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http://www.newsbytes.com/cgi-bin/udt/im.display.printable?client.id=newsbytes&story.id=168236
House Passes Legislation Requiring Carnivore Report
By David McGuire, Newsbytes
WASHINGTON, D.C., U.S.A.,
23 Jul 2001, 4:24 PM CST
The House of Representatives today approved legislation that would require the FBI and the Justice Department to give Congress detailed information about how the controversial "Carnivore" e-mail-monitoring device is used by law enforcers.
"We already have a pretty good idea of how Carnivore works. What we don't know is how it is used," said Richard Diamond, a spokesman for House Majority Leader Dick Armey, R-Texas, said today. Armey, who has been highly critical of Carnivore, strongly supported the legislation.
Passed today as an amendment to a Justice Department reauthorization package, the legislation, introduced by Rep. Bob Barr, R-Ga., requires the U.S. Attorney General and the head of the FBI to provide Congress with "extremely" detailed documentation about how Carnivore is used, Diamond said.
The strict language of the amendment "leaves no question (about Carnivore) unasked," he said.
The Justice reauthorization package passed the House by voice vote earlier today.
Designed to be hooked up directly to an Internet service provider's servers, Carnivore is a device capable of sifting through thousands of e-mail messages to find potentially criminal communications.
According to the FBI, although Carnivore may rifle through thousands of innocent e-mail communications to find what it is looking for, the device only captures messages that meet the specific parameters of a court order.
Human eyes never see messages that fail to meet those parameters, the FBI maintains.
Carnivore detractors - a group that includes a broad, bipartisan array of lawmakers and a bevy of civil liberties organizations - argue that because the device must sort through reams of non-criminal e-mail messages in order to find the evidence it is looking for, it unfairly compromises privacy.
Reported by Newsbytes.com
© 2001 The Washington Post Company
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