Carnivore is, in essence, a special filtering tool that can gather the information authorized by court order, and only that information. It permits law enforcement, for example, to gather only the email addresses of those persons with whom the drug dealer is communicating, without allowing any human being, either from law enforcement or the service provider, to view private information outside of the scope of the court's order.

By contrast, the Associate Director of the American Civil Liberties Union has claimed that:

Carnivore permits access to the email of every customer of an ISP and the [email] of every person who communicates with them. Carnivore is roughly equivalent to a wiretap capable of accessing the contents of the conversations of all of the phone company's customers, with the "assurance" that the FBI will record only conversations of the specified target.... In essence, Carnivore is a black box into which flows all of the service provider's communications traffic. The service provider knows what goes in, but it has no way of knowing what the FBI takes out.

Additionally, it is feared that the USA Patriot Act also permits government and law enforcement agencies to go on fishing expeditions.

1.What do you believe? And why?

2.How does Carnivore fit with existing laws?