Justification
Privacy Concerns
Education (top)
Educational institutions now depend on the Internet for most of their mission-critical activities, including administration, research, and subject-matter delivery. Yet, oftentimes the access to these critical applications is slowed by a deluge in network traffic created by other, less-important applications used mostly for entertainment or leisure activities, such as downloading music via Napster or Gnutella, and online messaging or chat. So for example, when a student tries to do some research for a class or to see a class lecture online, his/her productivity could be greatly hampered by myriad Napster users who overrun the network. Schools have an ethical responsibility to ensure that this does not happen and that learning always comes first, whether it be in real life or online. Because packet-monitoring software provides an answer to this problem, its use in educational contexts can be ethically justified.
Government (top)
The nation's communications networks are used routinely to commit serious criminal acts, including espionage, theft, extortion, etc. With the inception of the Internet, organized crime groups and drug trafficking organizations are starting to rely more heavily upon telecommunications to plan and execute their criminal activities. The ability of law enforcement agencies to conduct lawful electronic surveillance of the communications of its criminal subjects represents one of the most important methods of acquiring evidence to prevent serious criminal behavior. According to the FBI, "electronic surveillance has been extremely effective in securing the conviction of more than 25,600 dangerous felons over the past 13 years." The FBI has recently been faced with an increasing number of criminal investigations in which the criminal subjects used the Internet to communicate with each other or to communicate with their victims. But because many Internet service providers lacked the ability to identify and decipher a particular subject's messages to the exclusion of others, these criminals could not be convicted. Packet-monitoring software would enable the government to obtain the necessary evidence on particular suspects, and thus a limited use could be ethically justified.
Privacy Concerns
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
- U.S. Constitution, Fourth Amendment
Loss of User Privacy (top)
It would not be an overstatement to say that packet-monitoring technology could, by itself, completely de-privatize the Internet. In such a world, nothing that people do online would remain private and every action would leave a record or trace. Every "packet" of data that either leaves or enters your computer could in theory be intercepted and read by a third party. Reading your e-mail, visiting your favorite online news source or store, shopping, listening to music, watching a film clip ö all of these activities would result in your IP address being tagged and stamped onto different lists associated with whatever activity you are currently engaged in. Your Internet service provider would, in essence, be your "Big Brother" that would record your every online move and could, through Web-cams for example, extend even into your everyday life. Packet-monitoring technology would allow schools, businesses, and the government to blacklist people according to their online activities and to re-create their online trails. Anyone in position of authority would be able to, at a moment's notice, create a personal profile of their target and gain access to a wealth of information including the target's e-mail history, Web-browser history, online purchase history, and even some of the target's usernames and passwords. All of this may sound like a stark depiction of the online world to come. Yet, the technology is already in place to make it happen.
DragonWare (top)
Packeteer Inc. software, it turns out, is used not only by universities trying to control Napster overload on their networks, but also by the FBI in what is possibly its most controversial surveillance triad ö the "DragonWare Suite." According to recently declassified documents, the suite is made up of three programs: "Carnivore," the FBI's e-mail surveillance tool, "Packeteer," and "CoolMiner." The latter programs are used to reconstruct the raw data scooped up in the initial phase by Carnivore. The overall effect of the suite is that it can, in fact, not only snoop on someone's e-mail, but also "reconstruct Web pages exactly as a surveillance target saw them while surfing the Web," according to an analysis of the declassified documents by SecurityFocus, a California-based security firm.
This technology has incensed privacy and civil liberties groups alike, and has raised troubling questions about what constitutes a reasonable search and seizure of electronic data. While scanning the Internet for potential criminal conduct, the new technology also could scan private information about legal activities. "It goes to the heart of how the Fourth Amendment and the federal wiretap statute are going to be applied in the Internet age," said Marc Rotenberg, head of the Washington-based Electronic Privacy Information Center. The new system could, for example, be installed at the offices of Internet service providers and allow law enforcement officials to tailor their searches to obtain anything from someone's e-mail records to his/her online shopping activities. Washington lawyer Robert Corn-Revere, who represents one ISP that has resisted attaching the system to its network, was quoted as saying that such a system "could be used to track dissidents and journalists online." He even went as far as saying that the technology may lead to "issues of human rights." James Dempsey, an analyst with the Center for Democracy and Technology, a Washington high-tech policy group, also expressed worries about the suite. He noted that the device could be used not only for a warranted and precise search of a suspect's online transactions, but also for "broad sweeps of data" to gather general information about anyone that the FBI chooses to track. In his words, the DragonWare suite could become a "black box," and "no-one will be sure that it does what the government claims."