Carnivore is now DCS1000!

[Peter Sommer]

FBI takes the teeth out of Carnivore's name
By Erich Luening
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
February 9, 2001, 10:05 a.m. PT
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200-4769965.html?tag=prntfr
The FBI has dressed its online wolf in sheep's clothing, changing the name
of its controversial e-mail surveillance system, known to this point as
Carnivore.

Carnivore now goes by the less beastly moniker of DCS1000, drawn from the
work it does as a "digital collection system." The investigative agency
built the tool to monitor the Internet communications of suspects under
its surveillance, but the system, housed on computers at Internet service
providers, also can collect e-mail messages from people who are not part
of an FBI probe.

A spokesman for the FBI denied that the name change stemmed from worries
that the name Carnivore made the system sound like a predatory device made
to invade people's privacy. But the Illinois Institute of Technology,
which last fall issued an analysis of the system at the request of the
Justice Department, recommended that the name be changed for just that
reason, according to an IIT analyst.

"We had a concern that it wasn't a good name for the system," said the
IIT's Larry Reynolds. The group thought the name should be dumped, he
said, "because of the very definition of the word."

The name change is the latest development in the controversy surrounding
the surveillance tool, which came under public scrutiny last summer when
privacy advocates began to decry it. In September, the Justice Department
picked the IIT Research Institute to perform a government-sponsored
technical review of the software.

The rechristening is part of an upgrade that incorporates other
recommendations from the research group, according to Paul Bresson, a
spokesman for the FBI. "It isn't because we were worried about negative
privacy publicity. If it was, we would have changed (the name) months
ago," he said. "This (system) is not something that remains static."

The upgrade was supposed to be coordinated with a Justice Department
report on DCS1000 scheduled for release prior to Janet Reno's departure
last month as attorney general, Bresson said. He did not say when that
report will be made public.


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