Omnivore Source Code FOIA Document
Did the FBI build use text analysis for network-tapping? I found an interesting page on the Electronic Privacy Information Centre about Carnivore and Omnivore (its predecessor), two Internet monitoring systems created by the FBI. EPIC has a EPIC Carnivore Page with a summary and scans of documents recieved through Freedom of Information Requests. See also EPIC Carnivore FOIA Documents. The documents are fascinating given all the lines blacked out that you can try to guess at. There is a beauty to these documents with heavy black regions and “Secret” crossed out all over. Note how EPIC uses this aesthetic in their annual report.
There is an analysis of what Carnivore does based on the scanned data at, SecurityFocus HOME News: Carnivore Details Emerge. The CoolMiner analysis application seems to have done some processing and visualization (of what the person being spied on saw.) With a name with “miner” in it I suppose it would have had data-mining capability, whatever that means in this context. So, the answer is, yes, some text analysis capability seems to have been built into Carnivore.
Comments are closed.