The FBI has admitted using a program to intercept email traffic to find criminals. Privacy advocates and civil libertarians say the system could lead to broad electronic snooping on Americans…This must have been what the e-Envoy representative was talking about when he told us at last week’s UK.COM conference that other countries were secretly using RIP-style black box systems - and that we should be thankful the UK government was at least deigning to tell us about their version. Just like the UK’s RIP proposal, the Carnivore system is essentially a computer running specialized software, attached directly to an Internet Service Provider’s (ISP) network. In the US, it is put in place either when law enforcement has an order from a court permitting it to intercept in real time the contents of the electronic communications of a specific individual, or a trap and trace or pen register order allowing to it obtain the ‘numbers’ related to communications from or to a specified target.The same rhetoric standing behind RIP is being used to support Carnivore in the States. ‘The criminal world is taking advantage of today’s sophisticated technology to commit tomorrow’s crimes, so it is important that law enforcement also use technology, to prevent tomorrow’s crimes,’ an FBI spokesman said this week. Like the UK government, the FBI maintains that Carnivore should fall under existing wiretapping regulatioin, and that it is intended only to target individuals as the result of a court order. That, thanks to recent amendments in the House of Lords to the RIP bill, will also be the case in the UK. Like the meaures proposed under RIP, the carnivore system worries privacy advocates who believe the FBI will be unable to stop itself from abusing a system which gives law enforcement officers access to all traffic sent through an Internet service provider’s network. The FBI spokesman countered that Carnivore offered ‘extreme precision’, ‘met privacy concerns’ far better than traditional wiretaps, and argued that the system had been used less than 50 times since being developed last year in probes of computer hacker attacks, terrorism activities and other crimes.Barry Steinhardt, of the American Civil Liberties Union, said Carnivore violated constitutional guarantees against ‘unreasonable search and seizure’ as well as federal privacy laws. Carnivore allowed the FBI to conduct ‘an extraordinary dragnet search that would be inconceivable in the offline world,’ he said. Funnily enough, this is precisely what we argued in one of our earlier articles on RIP in the UK. Carnivore was first reported to US Congress on April 6th this year by Robert Corn-Revere, a Washington lawyer who represents an Internet service provider that is challenging a court order to comply with an order to allow FBI snooping. Corn-Revere said the company, whose name has not been disclosed in the sealed court proceedings, was concerned that the FBI device would be remotely controlled by FBI agents and could give agents ‘more than the information authorized under the (court) order.’ He’s not wrong, you know. The FBI admits that it’s impossible to guarantee that Internet wiretaps are not abused, but says it’s ‘extremely unlikely’. ‘There are very severe penalties, civil and criminal, if the FBI were to misuse the system,’ their spokesman said.