FBI E-Mail Tapping Tool Within Bounds, Review Says

A review of the FBI’s Carnivore e-mail surveillance tool largely dismissed criticism that the system invades the privacy of Americans, the head of the review team said Tuesday.

Henry H. Perritt, dean of the Illinois Institute of Technology’s Chicago-Kent College of Law, which conducted the review, said that in most cases, Carnivore does not “overcollect” information beyond a court order and frequently even is configured so that it doesn’t collect as much data as is authorized.

The report includes recommendations to the FBI to make Carnivore more efficient, as well as to make the device easier for FBI agents to use.

Atty. Gen. Janet Reno ordered the monthlong review, which cost the government more than $170,000, in response to fears that the government was overstepping its bounds to tap and confiscate e-mail correspondence.

Critics blasted the report. A civil rights lawyer said it presented nothing more than a “fuzzy snapshot” of the investigative tool. Others said its authors harbored a bias for the government.

House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-Texas), a longtime Carnivore critic, said the choice of the reviewers dictated the tone of the report.

“The Department of Justice selected reviewers and set the rules in order to ensure they would get the best possible review,” Armey said in a statement Tuesday. “That makes this review questionable.”

Perritt advised President Clinton’s transition team on information policy in 1992 and performed other tasks for the Clinton administration. He worked also for previous Republican administrations.

Other members of his team have current or former security clearances from the Defense Department, the Treasury Department or the National Security Agency, and one worked at the Justice Department in the 1980s.

Perritt shrugged off the allegations and insisted his team was independent.

“This is an old criticism,” Perritt said in an interview Tuesday. “We had access to whatever we wanted.”

The FBI uses Carnivore under the same statutes that were written for telephone taps. Those laws don’t always translate well, Perritt said: In a telephone trace order, authorities get the phone numbers of the caller and the person called; in an e-mail, there can be multiple recipients of the same message, creating a legal conundrum.

Barry Steinhardt, associate director of the American Civil Liberties Union, echoed Armey.

“We continue to believe that this was not an independent study,” he said. “Most of the truly independent institutions declined to bid for the contract.”