[AP - 7/14/00 - ATLANTA] EarthLink Network today said it has reached an agreement with the FBI to avoid future use of the email surveillance device "Carnivore," which disrupted Internet access for some EarthLink customers earlier this year.
The Atlanta-based company, which has about 4.2 million subscribers nationwide, said it had installed the snooping software for the FBI at a data center in Pasadena, Calif., earlier this year after it lost a decision on the matter in federal court.
When Carnivore wouldn't work with an operating system on the company's machines, an older system was installed for the device, which then led some servers to crash, EarthLink's director of technology acquisition, Steve Dougherty told The Wall Street Journal.
Dougherty said "many" customers were affected, although he declined to say how many or where.
Carnivore, which an FBI spokesman said was first used in spring 1999, scans all incoming and outgoing emails for messages of suspected criminals.
FBI spokesman Steven Berry said the device gives the agency "a surgical ability to intercept and collect the communications which are the subject of a court order" and ignores everything else.
EarthLink spokesman Kurt Rahn said the company and FBI officials have agreed that the company will collect such data itself when investigators obtain court orders in the future.
"Basically, we reached a mutual agreement with the FBI that we would be able to monitor and gather the information that they needed ourselves," Rahn said. "That way, they got what they wanted, and we were able to maintain the integrity of our network."
Berry declined to confirm any such agreement or discuss which Internet service providers (ISP) have installed Carnivore. Berry said the bureau is using the device, but he declined to say in how many cases or where.
All Carnivore installations are done "in close cooperation" with ISPs, Berry said, but the FBI collects the data itself.
Rahn said the company has no problem with following court orders to provide customer information to law enforcement but is concerned when doing so compromises its operations.
"It wasn't necessarily anything that was terribly disruptive, but it was more sort of the potential that it could have been worse," Rahn said of the outage Carnivore caused.
"And basically, since delivering email and delivering the Internet to our members is what we do, having that threatened is not going to work for us."
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[posted 7/17/00]
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