When US Attorney General Janet Reno announced recently that the FBI had used the "first Internet wiretap" to catch a 22-year-old Argentinean hacker, it was one more step in the government's march toward deconstruction of personal privacy. The FBI used a modified "sniffer" program, a tool that monitors network traffic, to watch for the hacker's digital footprints. But the program also sucked in two unrelated messages due to coincidental similarities. Result: slam dunk invasion of privacy.
It can be argued that having a computer monitor communications is preferable to having a human do it. Computers can be made to forget. The troubling aspect, points out David Banisar of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, is that computers can be tweaked to capture any kind of data at relentless speeds. The fact that the FBI's foray into computer assisted wiretapping failed on its first outing should be enough to set off alarm signals.
- Brock N. Meeks (brock@wired.com) is Wired's Washington correspondent.
