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How We Made Our Own “Carnivore”
'Alexander R. Galloway
Alexander R. Galloway
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' RSG (Radical Software Group)
RSG (Radical Software Group)
Disobedience to authority is one of the most natural and healthy acts.
Empire, Hardt & Negri Ethernet was invented at the University of Hawaii. Scientists there in the early 1970s faced a unique problem: How to network different campuses, each on different islands separated by water. (1) The solution was to use the free airwaves, to transmit data through the air, or “ether,” using radio. There were no wires. Like a radio station, each node sent messages broadly over the sea to other islands. A protocol was developed to avoid collision between simultaneous communications. Ever since, Ethernet has been based on an open transmission model. The protocol translated well to wire-based networks too, and is now the most widely used local networking protocol in the world.
Since Ethernet is based on an open broadcast model, it is a trifle for listeners to make themselves “promiscuous” and eavesdrop on all communications, not simply those specifically addressed to them. This technique is called packet-sniffing and has been used by systems administrators and hackers alike for decades. Ethernet, sniffers, and hacking are at the heart of a public domain surveillance suite called Carnivore developed by RSG and now used in a civilian context by many artists and scientists around
the world.
Hacking Today there are generally two things said about hackers. They are either terrorists or libertarians. Historically the word meant an amateur tinkerer, an autodidact who might try a dozen solutions to a problem before being rewarded by any success. (2) As Bruce Sterling writes, the term hacker “can signify the free-wheeling intellectual exploration of the highest and deepest potential of computer systems.” (3) Or as the glowing Steven Levy reminisces of the original MIT hackers of the early sixties, "they were such fascinating people. [...] Beneath their often unimposing exteriors, they were adventurers, visionaries, risk-takers, artists...and the ones who most clearly saw why the computer was a truly revolutionary tool.” (4) These types of hackers are freedom fighters, living by the dictum that data wants to be free. (5) Information should not be owned, and even if it is, non-invasive browsing of such information hurts no one. After all, hackers merely exploit preexisting holes made by clumsily constructed code. (6) And wouldn’t the revelation of such holes actually improve data security for everyone involved?
Yet after a combination of public technophobia and aggressive government legislation, the identity of the hacker changed in the US in the mid to late eighties from do-it-yourself hobbyist to digital outlaw. (7) Such legislation includes the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986 which made it a felony to break into federal computers. Hackers were deeply discouraged by their newfound identity as outlaws, as exemplified in the famous 1986 hacker manifesto written by someone calling himself (8) The Mentor: “We explore ... and you call us criminals. We seek after knowledge ... and you call us criminals.” (9) Because of this semantic transformation, hackers today are commonly referred to as terrorists, nary-do-wells who break into computers for personal gain. So by the turn of the millennium, the term hacker had lost all of its original meaning. Now when people say hacker, they mean terrorist.
Thus, the current debate on hackers is helplessly throttled by the discourse on contemporary liberalism: should we respect data as private property, or should we cultivate individual freedom and leave computer users well alone? Hacking is more sophisticated than that. It suggests a future type of cultural production, one that RSG seeks to embody in Carnivore.
Collaboration Bruce Sterling writes that the late Twentieth Century is a moment of transformation from a modern control paradigm based on centralization and hierarchy to a postmodern one based on flexibility and horizontalization:
For years now, economists and management theorists have speculated that the tidal wave of the information revolution would destroy rigid, pyramidal bureaucracies, where everything is top-down and centrally controlled. Highly trained “employees” would take on greater autonomy, being selfstarting and self-motivating, moving from place to place, task to task, with great speed and fluidity. “Ad-hocracy” would rule, with groups of people spontaneously knitting together across organizational lines, tackling the problem at hand, applying intense computer-aided expertise to it, and then vanishing whence they came. (10) From Manuel Castells to Hakim Bey to Tom Peters this rhetoric has become commonplace. Sterling continues by claiming that both hacker groups and the law enforcement officials that track hackers follow this new paradigm: “they all look and act like ‘tiger teams’ or ‘users’ groups.’ They are all electronic ad-hocracies leaping up spontaneously to attempt to meet a need.” (11) By “tiger teams” Sterling refers to the employee groups assembled by computer companies trying to test the security of their computer systems. Tiger teams, in essence, simulate potential hacker attacks, hoping to find and repair security holes. RSG is a type of tiger team.
Hackers are autonomous agents that can mass together in small groups to attack specific problems. Hackers embody a different organizational management style (one that might be called “protocological”). In this sense, while resistance during the modern age forms around rigid hierarchies and bureaucratic power structures, resistance during the postmodern age forms around the protocological control forces existent in networks.
Coding In 1967 the artist Sol LeWitt outlined his definition of conceptual art:
In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art. (12) LeWitt’s perspective on conceptual art has important implications for code, for in his estimation conceptual art is nothing but a type of code for artmaking. LeWitt’s art is an algorithmic process. The algorithm is prepared in advance, and then later executed by the artist (or another artist, for that matter).
How can code be so different than mere writing? The answer to this lies in the unique nature of computer code. It lies not in the fact that code is sub-linguistic, but rather that it is hyper-linguistic. Code is a language, but a very special kind of language. Code is the only language that is executable. As Kittler has pointed out, “[t]here exists no word in any ordinary language which does what it says. No description of a machine sets the machine into motion.” (13) So code is the first language that actually does what it says—it is a machine for converting meaning into action. (14) Code has a semantic meaning, but it also has an enactment of meaning.
Dreaming Fredric Jameson said somewhere that one of the most difficult things to do under contemporary capitalism is to envision utopia. This is precisely why dreaming is important. Deciding (and often struggling) for what is possible is the first step for a utopian vision based in our desires, based in what we want.
This visionary tone is exactly what Jameson warns is lacking in much contemporary discourse. The relationship between utopia and possibility is a close one. It is necessary to know what one wants, to know what is possible to want, before a true utopia may be envisioned.
One of the most important signs of this utopian instinct is the hacking community’s anti-commercial bent. Software products have long been developed and released into the public domain, with seemingly no profit motive on the side of the authors, simply for the higher glory of the code itself.
However, greater than this anti-commercialism is a pro-protocolism. Protocol, by definition, is “open source,” the term given to a technology that makes public the source code used in its creation. That is to say, protocol is nothing but an elaborate instruction list of how a given technology should work, from the inside out, from the top to the bottom, as exemplified in the RFCs, or “Request For Comments” documents. While many closed source technologies may appear to be protocological due to their often monopolistic position in the market place, a true protocol cannot be closed or proprietary. It must be paraded into full view before all, and agreed to by all. It benefits over time through its own technological development in the public sphere. It must exist as pure, transparent code (or a pure description of how to fashion code). If technology is proprietary it ceases to be protocological.
This brings us back to Carnivore, and the desire to release a public domain version of a notorious surveillance tool thus far only available to government operatives. The RSG Carnivore levels the playing field, recasting art and culture as a scene of multilateral conflict rather than unilateral domination. It opens the system up for collaboration within and between client artists. It uses code to engulf and modify the original FBI apparatus.
Carnivore Personal Edition On October 1, 2001, three weeks after the 9/11 attacks in the US, the Radical Software Group (RSG) announced the release of Carnivore, a public domain riff on the notorious FBI software called DCS1000 (which is commonly referred to by its nickname “Carnivore”). While the FBI software had already been in existence for some time, and likewise RSG had been developing its version of the software since January 2001, 9/11 brought on a crush of new surveillance activity. Rumors surfaced that the FBI was installing Carnivore willy-nilly on broad civilian networks like Hotmail and AOL with the expressed purpose of intercepting terror-related communication. As Wired News reported on September 12, 2001, “An administrator at one major network service provider said that FBI agents showed up at his workplace on [September 11] ‘with a couple of Carnivores, requesting permission to place them in our core.’” Officials at Hotmail were reported to have been “cooperating” with FBI monitoring requests. Inspired by this activity, the RSG’s Carnivore sought to pick up where the FBI left off, to bring this technology into the hands of the general public for greater surveillance saturation within culture. The first RSG Carnivore ran on Linux. An open source schematic was posted on the net for others to build their own boxes. New functionality was added to improve on the FBI-developed technology (which in reality was a dumbed-down version of tools systems administrators had been using for years). The initial testing proved successful and led to more field-testing at the Princeton Art Museum (where Carnivore was quarantined like a virus into its own subnet) and the New Museum in New York. During the weekend of February 1st 2002, Carnivore was used at Eyebeam to supervise the hacktivists protesting the gathering of the World Economic Forum.
Sensing the market limitations of a Linux-only software product, RSG released Carnivore Personal Edition (PE) for Windows on April 6, 2002. CarnivorePE brought a new distributed architecture to the Carnivore initiative by giving any PC user the ability to analyze and diagnose the traffic from his or her own network. Any artist or scientist could now use CarnivorePE as a surveillance engine to power his or her own interpretive “Client.” Soon Carnivore Clients were converting network traffic to sound, animation, and even 3D worlds, distributing the technology across the network. The prospect of reverse-engineering the original FBI software was uninteresting to RSG. Crippled by legal and ethical limitations, the FBI software needed improvement not emulation. Thus CarnivorePE features exciting new functionality including artist-made diagnostic clients, remote access, full subject targetting, full data targetting, volume buffering, transport protocol filtering, and an open source software license. Reverse-engineering is not necessarily a simple mimetic process, but a mental upgrade as well. RSG has no desire to copy the FBI software and its many shortcomings. Instead, RSG longs to inject progressive politics back into a fundamentally destabilizing and transformative technology, packet sniffing. Our goal is to invent a new use for data surveillance that breaks out of the hero / terrorist dilemma and instead dreams about a future use for networked data.
(1)
The system at the University of Hawaii was called ALOHAnet and was created by Norman Abramson. Later the technology was further developed by Robert Metcalfe at Xerox PARC and dubbed “Ethernet”.  back
(2)
Robert Graham traces the etymology of the term to the sport of golf: “The word ‘hacker’ started out in the 14th century to mean somebody who was inexperienced or unskilled at a particular activity (such as a golf hacker). In the 1970s, the word ‘hacker’ was used by computer enthusiasts to refer to themselves. This reflected the way enthusiasts approach computers: they eschew formal education and play around with the computer until they can get it to work. (In much the same way, a golf hacker keeps hacking at the golf ball until they get it in the hole)” (www.robertgraham.com/pubs/hacking-dict.html). back
(3)
Bruce Sterling. The Hacker Crackdown, p.51. Bantam, New York,1992. back
(4)
Steven Levy. Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, p. ix. Anchor Press / Doubleday, New York,1984 back
(5)
This slogan is attributed to Stewart Brand, who wrote that “[o]n the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it‘s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.” See “Whole Earth Review,” p.49, May 1985 back
(6)
Many hackers believe that commercial software products are less carefully crafted and therefore more prone to exploits. Perhaps the most infamous example of such an exploit, one which critiques software’s growing commercialization, is the “BackOrifice” software application created by the hacker group Cult of the Dead Cow. A satire of Microsoft’s “Back Office” software suite, BackOrifice acts as a Trojan Horse to allow remote access to personal computers running Microsoft’s Windows operating system. back
(7)
For an excellent historical analysis of this transformation see Sterling’s The Hacker Crackdown. back
(8)
While many hackers use gender neutral pseudonyms, the online magazine “Phrack,” with which The Mentor was associated, was characterized by its distinctly male staff and readership. For a sociological explanation of the gender imbalance within the hacking community, see Paul Taylor. Hackers: Crime in the digital sublime, pp.32–42. Routledge, New York, 1999 back
(9)
The Mentor. The Conscience of a Hacker, Phrack, vol. 1, no. 7, file 3. www.iit.edu/~beberg/manifesto.html back
(10)
Sterling. The Hacker Crackdown, p. 184. back
(11)
Ibid. back
(12)
Sol LeWitt. Paragraphs on Conceptual Art, in Alberro, et al., eds., Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology. p.12. MIT Press, Cambridge, 1999. Thanks to Mark Tribe for bringing this passage to my attention. back
(13)
Friedrich Kittler. On the Implementation of Knowledge—Toward a Theory of Hardware, In: “nettime” (www.nettime.org/nettime.w3archive/199902/msg00038.html). back
(14)
For an interesting commentary on the aesthetic dimensions of this fact see Geoff Cox, Alex McLean and Adrian Ward. The Aesthetics of Generative Code (sidestream.org/papers/aesthetics/). back
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