Back in 2002, the Open Carnivore project was at the forefront of the FBI’s plans to tackle cyber-crime. A state of the art (at the time) online surveillance system, Carnivore was awarded the Arts Electronica “Golden Nica” award and was being heralded as a breakthrough by many industry experts.

Today, few people will ever have heard of the software. So what went wrong?

Essentially, the project was the victim of pressure groups who claimed that it compromised the security of computer network users, and that it could potentially gather more information than it needed, or had a right to store. The fact that the end user of Carnivore would then have the ability to discard any such unwanted information was ignored by those who felt they had found a new cause to champion.

It was eventually found that Open carnivore could violate the “unreasonable searches and seizures” prohibition from the fourth amendment of the US Constitution, and as such, the software was retired and replaced with alternative systems.

You can still view the original information regarding Carnivore at the Carnivore Blog which has been preserved as an archive of what the project once achieved, although it now serves as more of a general information and current affairs site.

It is reasonable to assume that due to its age, Carnivore would have been superseded anyway, as any user nowadays would have been able to avoid detection by Carnivore by simply using a VPN or some form of secure encryption which is readily available. Nevertheless, it was a pioneering product in its day.