Anti
Terrorism Technology:
Magic Lantern
Surveillance System
Magic
Lantern
In
addition to Carnivore, the FBI
has been criticized for its recent
development of the "Magic
Lantern" software. Magic Lantern
is keylogging software that is
a combination computer worm/trojan
horse. It installs itself on the
target computer and allows for
keystroke capturing. The rationale
for developing Magic Lantern is
to allow the FBI to crack the encryption
that is used by terrorists and
other criminals. While encryption
codes are near impossible to break,
the task is trivial once the encryption
keys are captured (Verton).
Keylogging viruses are nothing
new--the technology, first used
by hackers, has been around for
3 years (Lemos).
If the reports about Magic Lantern
are right, then the only thing
new about the software is that
it is being employed by a law
enforcement agency.
Concerns
Regarding Magic Lantern
The
same privacy groups that were upset
over the FBI's Carnivore system
expressed similar concerns about the Magic Lantern software
(Eng, Lemos,
Sullivan, Verton). "I
am very concerned about civil
liberties at this
point and certainly about increased penetration of online
activities. The
odds that our privacy is being invaded by the U.S. government
have
certainly gone up, and the odds that we will ever know
about it have gone
down," commented Steve Kobrin, professor of multinational
management at
the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in
Philadelphia (Verton).
Yet there is considerably less concern over Magic Lantern
than over
Carnivore. Why? As Representative Richard Armey's spokesman
puts it, "If
Magic Lantern is as described, then it is a rifle-shot
attack on a
suspect, compared with Carnivore's shotgun blast" (Lemos).
While Carnivore
is capable of digesting a great deal of network traffic,
Magic Lantern can
only be installed on a single PC at a time. The Electronic
Privacy
Information Center did not reject Magic Lantern as fully
as Carnivore,
presumably because of the apparently limited capabilities
of Magic
Lantern (Sullivan).
A victory for privacy activists in the Magic Lantern
arena comes from the private sector, where anti-virus companies
swiftly
dismissed the FBI's request that Magic Lantern be ignored
by their
software (Eng, Lemos, Verton).
Discussion
Unlike
Carnivore, Magic Lantern is strictly
a personal surveillence
technology--it does not have the potential to be used as
mass surveillance
tool. As a result, Magic Lantern is much more analagous
to a phone tap
than Carnivore. The tool is used to target an individual
already
suspected of wrongdoing, and would be hard to employ otherwise,
partially
explaining the less fervent criticism of Magic Lantern.
