Carnivore (software)

The Carnivore Project (Latin carnivores ) is an extremely controversial project of the American Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI ), whose goal is to monitor the mail and online behavior of Internet users on criminal activities.

Carnivore is, according to many experts and lay the third stage of evolution of the FBI surveillance mechanisms for online traffic, the following projects as omnivores and Etherpeek (the latter is a commercial software that has been adapted for the FBI ).

In the late 1990s, the second stage, project Omnivore a method to specific Internet Service Provider ( ISP) and the mail traffic on their servers began to monitor and read along, suspicious packages or mail.

1999 Omnivore was terminated in favor of Carnivore, because the FBI with the Carnivore program were available for better ways to generally monitor the traffic of ISPs without having to enter specific server. According to information from Internet sources should Carnivore part of Dragonware suite be a three-part program package that contains, among other very sophisticated packet sniffer and data analysis systems.

Meanwhile, the Carnivore system by the FBI with the innocuous name " DCS1000 " (DCS = Digital Collection System) has been provided.