Salon: Defanging Carnivore | Linux Today

Salon: Defanging Carnivore

Written By
Web Webster
Web Webster
Sep 25, 2000

“Graham is the CTO of NetworkICE, a security company he
co-founded with Greg Gilliom and Clinton Lum to provide
“anti-hacking” services such as intrusion detection software. Given
his family background and his own interests, one could understand
that Graham might be interested in anything related to
cyber-snooping. But on Tuesday Graham took his involvement to a
whole new level, inserting himself directly into the middle of the
charged debate over Carnivore — the FBI’s much-maligned system for
spying on the e-mails of suspected criminals.”

“Graham released to the general public the source code to
“Altivore,” a program that mimics all the capabilities of
Carnivore. Part protest against Carnivore’s potential for invasions
of privacy and part defensive measure aimed at subverting
Carnivore, Altivore is the latest escalation of the ongoing battle
over just how much privacy we can expect in cyberspace….”

“A: Is it accurate to characterize Altivore as open-source
software?”

“A: That depends on someone’s open-source definition. Right now,
we’re holding the copyright close to our chest because there are so
many open-source licenses out there to choose from. Right now,
we’re basically just “copyright: us.” I think we’re looking at the
BSD license, rather than the GPL license.”


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Web Webster

Web Webster

Web Webster has more than 20 years of writing and editorial experience in the tech sector. He’s written and edited news, demand generation, user-focused, and thought leadership content for business software solutions, consumer tech, and Linux Today, he edits and writes for a portfolio of tech industry news and analysis websites including webopedia.com, and DatabaseJournal.com.

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