Technology and terrorism
New tools sought to track terror online
Law enforcement, ISPs try to balance privacy, security
By Jason Krause
Special to the Tribune
October 15, 2001
Prior to Sept. 11, terrorists took full advantage of the Internet to communicate with little fear of being intercepted.
Since then, federal investigators have been busy chasing leads from Internet companies that may have unknowingly provided access to terrorists. Law enforcement and Internet service providers are struggling to find an efficient way to hunt criminals online. Federal law does not adequately detail how law enforcement officials are to police the Internet.
"The government definitely needs new tools to help them police the Net, because whatever they're doing today is not working," said Richard Smith, chief technical officer at the Privacy Foundation, a group that studies communications technology and privacy issues. "At the same time, if we give them too much leeway, a lot of people worry that we could be heading down a slippery slope toward the loss of personal privacy."
The nation's two largest Internet service providers, America Online and EarthLink, confirmed that they are cooperating with law enforcement officials' efforts to track
terrorist activity on the Web.
"Our basic policy is to comply with the law," said Les Seagraves, chief privacy officer for EarthLink. "There are certain subtleties to the law, but as long as law enforcement comes to us looking for specific information about a crime or criminal activity, we will comply."
So far, law enforcement officials have had little success. The main reason is simply that the technology is not designed to leave a traceable record.
"We've developed a very streamlined process to comply with law enforcement," AOL spokesman Nicholas Graham said. "But you have to remember, we can only help if we have data somewhere in our system. With a lot of our technology, like Instant Messages, a conversation is never stored on our system."
To make tracking criminals even harder, free e-mail services, such as those offered by Yahoo or Microsoft's Hotmail, make it possible to set up an anonymous e-mail account.
In addition, there are services called remailers which strip e-mail of any identifying information, making it impossible to trace a message.
Most problematic is encryption technology that makes it difficult for agents to read an intercepted message unless they have the proper codes.
Congress is trying to rush through legislation to help law enforcement deal with Internet communications. Some worry Congress may give police too much power, though most agree that some sort of help is needed.
"Some of [the legislation] is not bad; in fact most of it is overdue," Smith said. "Congress definitely needs to get involved and set the rules. Of course, you have to be careful what you wish for when you ask Congress to write new laws. It took 10 to 20 years for them to get telephone wiretapping laws right."
There has been no indication that government investigators are overstepping their jurisdiction in hunting terrorists on the Web. But civil libertarians worry that with expanded powers and new technology, the government will be able to spy on anyone on the Internet.
The technology most commonly cited is known as Carnivore, or, less menacingly, as the DCS1000. Carnivore is designed to sit on a network and monitor electronic communications by watching for specific words or codes and saving copies of any messages containing these elements. If deployed, it would open up broad
wiretapping capabilities for the government.
However, it's not clear yet how effective this technology is or whether it is even being used.
"Carnivore sounds great in theory, but in practice it's nearly impossible to try to filter through every suspicious message on the Net," said Jack Mattera, a former
federal investigator and director of computer forensics for The Intelligence Group, a business investigations and intelligence firm.
"Things like this will work only if you have a target in mind, a specific individual whose movement and communications you want to track."
Congress is studying legislation that makes it easier for law enforcement to get subpoenas for digital information. In addition, it is looking into mandating makers of encryption technology to create ways for police to crack encrypted messages.
It's too soon to know what effect such laws might have, but Web surfers may never be able to count on the same levels of privacy they expect today.
Copyright © 2001, Chicago Tribune
