DOJ to seek review of e-mail surveillance system

Attorney General Janet Reno said Thursday that the Justice Department would contract with a university to conduct an independent technical examination of the FBI's controversial "Carnivore" e-mail surveillance system.

Reno said that "the university review team will have total access to any information they need to conduct their review," but the principal investigator at one of the universities being considered for the job said he had been negotiating with the department over the ground rules for the investigation.

"We have proposed some ground rules and they have proposed some," said Tom Perrine, principal investigator at the Pacific Institute for Computer Security at the University of California at San Diego. "We are working at getting a set of rules that both sides can live with and that will allow for a true scientific inquiry," Perrine said.

The Justice Department said it has contacted three universities as potential reviewers of the Carnivore system, and could contact up to six more within the next 10 days.

After the chosen university conducts its analysis and a portion of its findings are made public, a second team at Justice will review Carnivore before making final recommendations to Reno about the system by the end of the year. The second review team will be chaired by Assistant Attorney General Steve Colgate and include Donald Procnitz, the department's chief science and technology officer, Ed Dumont, the department's chief privacy officer, a representative of the department's criminal division and FBI Assistant Director Donald Kerr, who heads the agency's laboratory.

"My impression is that they are looking for as fair a review as they can get," said UC San Diego's Perrine, who has called for public release of Carnivore's software source code. The FBI has opposed the release of that code.

In a Wednesday letter to House Judiciary Committee member Rep. Bob Barr, R-Ga., FBI Assistant Director for Public Affairs John Collingwood said that national security concerns prevented its public release. Agency officials also have cited proprietary source code as another reason for not publicly releasing the code.

"They have to release it to someone or they will have no credibility," Perrine said. "It will end up between open source and fully closed, but I think they will be better served to deal with academia" in an open fashion.

"It is necessary for a review of Carnivore to look at the system as a system, and not as small piece of code," said Matt Blaze, a research scientist at AT&T Labs who testified about Carnivore before a House Judiciary Committee Subcommittee last month.