Carnivore, also known as the Carnivore Electronic Communication Collection System, is the name of a series of software developed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) for monitoring Internet communications.

Carnivore is probably modeled like other packet-sniffing software.

Carnivore was created by the FBI to intercept and copy data packets to and from people at the site of an Internet service provider (ISP). Congress passed a law that forced all ISPs to allow an FBI agent to install Carnivore at their location.

The FBI officially dropped the name Carnivore in 2001 to adopt a more neutral sounding name. That name is DCS1000.

With Internet usage growing rapidly during the 90's, the FBI wanted a way to intercept network data traffic in much the same way that phone taps are used to gather evidence of criminal activity.

The first generation of packet capture software created by the FBI in the mid-1990s is still kept in secret. The second generation of packet capture software was called Omnivore and was developed in 1997 for the Solaris x86 platform. The software and hardware cost about $900,000 to make. Omnivore was designed to give the FBI the capability of capturing Internet data based on users' identities. It could also capture e-mail.

The third generation of packet capture software was created under the top secret project name Phiple Troenix (Carnivore), and was to replace Omnivore. The FBI wanted to shrink the size of the system down so that it could be run on any personal computer. The result was the Carnivore suite of software that could run on the Microsoft NT operating system, at a cost of $800,000.

In the video below, I will show you how I think Carnivore/DSC1000 works. In a nutshell, a system is installed in the machine room of an ISP under the administration of an FBI agent. All the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) data (packets) traveling past the Carnivore insertion point are captured as a copy of the data stream. There is not an interruption of data because the data are merely mirrored as they flow past.

The captured TCP/IP data packets are written to a buffer in order to store the copies of the packet data. Therefore Carnivore could be configured to capture all emails to john@hotmail.com. All the packet data to that email address would be written from the buffer to either a tape, zip drive, or hard drive, while all the other data would be flushed from the buffer.

Carnivore can be configured to not only capture all data to or from a particular email address, but also packets sent or received from a fixed or dynamic Internet Protocol (IP) address. This means that not only email is captured, but web pages browsed, the file transfer protocol, or any transfers from a particular computer can be captured.

To go into greater detail about how the FBI's Carnivore or DSC1000 program works, see the video below.

Duration : 0:7:00

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