Amidst a storm of national controversy over a recent program developed by the Justice Department to monitor individuals' electronic mail use, an independent investigation will be conducted by a university to determine the program's capabilities and potential uses.
Dean of Dartmouth's Thayer School of Engineering Lewis Duncan said that, despite the fact that the engineering school hosts the Justice Department's Institute for Security Technology, the College will not apply for the chance to research the new program.
Duncan said this decision was made after considering that Thayer's close involvement with the Justice Department may lead some to believe the College's study would not be objective. However, he stressed that the institute does not take stances on policy issues such as this.
The Justics Department's surveillance program, known as Carnivore, has the capability to monitor individual's Internet use and especially their e-mail messages.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation has said in the past that they plan to use the program only with permission from a judicial body similar to the way phone taps are used now.
Recent congressional legislation reiterated the same requirements.
Controversy has arisen due to the potential for Carnivore to be misused and would allow the government to monitor anyone's messages without discretion or due process.
Duncan said that, while this is possible, people should think of the new technology much as they think of telephone taps now, adding that current technology is used predominantly to safeguard the rights of the public at the expense of a very few individuals' liberties.
He also said that he does not believe the technology currently exists to monitor all Internet users' mail messages.
The technology was first used approximately 18 months ago and has been used fewer than 25 times since then. The admissibility of information obtained through Carnivore has not yet been tested in a court case.
Duncan said he believes the potential for abuse of the technology is greater in the private sector than by the government, adding that corporations might be interested in monitoring the e-mail of their workers, which he said crosses current expectations of privacy in the workplace.
Duncan does not, however, forsee the technology being used to track messages at colleges and universities.
"Colleges have typically been bastions of individual rights," he said, commenting on the fact that he does not believe colleges would implement the monitoring.
Duncan also spoke of a "gray area" involving circumstances where classified information and national security are at stake, citing the Los Alamos National Laboratory as an example.
He said that many could make the argument that messages coming in and going out of classified areas should be monitored in the name of national security.
The American Civil Liberties Union has recently filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act to receive the source code for Carnivore.
Duncan said he believes the request is not in line with previous interpretations of the act, adding that software in the past has been considered intellectual property much like other, physical devices; not simply the text of the source code.
"The information about how they're going to use Carnivore [would be covered under FOIA]," Duncan said. Obtaining the source code for software has not been historically covered by the act, he added.
