intelligent agent vol. 3 no. 1 the political sphere how we made our own carnivore: rsg download pdf

How We Made Our Own "Carnivore" by RSG

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 trivial 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 (http://rhizome.org/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 autodictat who might try a dozen solutions to a problem before eking out success.[2] Aptitude and perseverance have always eclipsed rote knowledge in the hacking community. Hackers are the type of technophiles you like to have around in a pinch, for given enough time they generally can crack any problem (or at least find a suitable kludge). Thus, 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?
 

"Disobedience to authority is one of the
most natural and healthy acts."
-Empire, Hardt & Negri

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 enough 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 self-starting 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."[12]

The term also alludes to the management style known as Toyotism originating in Japanese automotive production facilities. Within Toyotism, small pods of workers mass together to solve a specific problem. The pods are not linear and fixed like the more traditional assembly line, but rather are flexible and reconfigurable depending on whatever problem might be posed to them.

Management expert Tom Peters notes that the most successful contemporary corporations use these types of tiger teams, eliminating traditional hierarchy within the organizational structure. Documenting the management consulting agency McKinsey & Company, Peters writes: "McKinsey is a huge company. Customers respect it. [...] But there is no traditional hierarchy. There are no organizational charts. No job descriptions. No policy manuals. No rules about managing client engagements. [...] And yet all these things are well understood-make no mistake, McKinsey is not out of control! [...] McKinsey works. It's worked for over half a century."[14] As Sterling suggests, the hacker community also follows this organizational style. Hackers are autonomous agents that can mass together in small groups to attack specific problems. As the influential hacker magazine Phrack was keen to point out, "ANYONE can write for Phrack Inc. [...] we do not discriminate against anyone for any reason."[15] Flexible and versatile, the hacker pod will often dissolve itself as quickly as it formed and disappear into the network. Thus, what Sterling and others are arguing is that whereby older resistive forces were engaged with "rigid, pyramidal bureaucracies," 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."[16]

Code is a language, but a very special kind of language.
Code is the only language that is executable

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.

Pierre Lévy is one writer who has been able to articulate eloquently the possibility of utopia in the cyberspace of digital computers.[21] "Cyberspace," he writes, "brings with it methods of perception, feeling, remembering, working, of playing and being together. [...] The development of cyberspace [...] is one of the principle aesthetic and political challenges of the coming century."[22] Lévy's 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.

Once 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. "Spacewar was not sold," Steven Levy writes, referring to the early video game developed by several early computer enthusiasts at MIT. "Like any other program, it was placed in the drawer for anyone to access, look at, and rewrite as they saw fit."[23] The limits of personal behavior become the limits of possibility to the hacker. Thus, it is obvious to the hacker that one's personal investment in a specific piece of code can do nothing but hinder that code's overall development. "Sharing of software [...] is as old as computers," writes free software guru Richard Stallman, "just as sharing of recipes is as old as cooking."[24] Code does not reach its apotheosis for people, but exists within its own dimension of perfection. The hacker feels obligated to remove all impediments, all inefficiencies that might stunt this quasi-aesthetic growth. "In its basic assembly structure," writes Andrew Ross, "information technology involves processing, copying, replication, and simulation, and therefore does not recognize the concept of private information property."[25] Commercial ownership of software is the primary impediment hated by all hackers because it means that code is limited--limited by intellectual property laws, limited by the profit motive, limited by corporate "lamers."

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). An initial core (Alex Galloway, Mark Napier, Mark Daggett, Joshua Davis, and others) began to build interpretive interfaces. A testing venue was selected: the private offices of Rhizome.org at 115 Mercer Street in New York City, only 30 blocks from Ground Zero. This space was out-of-bounds to the FBI, but open to RSG.
 

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 diagnosic 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 soft-ware 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.

http://rhizome.org/carnivore
http://rhizome.org/RSG
 
 
 
 

NOTES:
[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."

[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.) http://www.robertgraham.com/pubs/hacking-dict.html.

[3] Bruce Sterling The Hacker Crackdown (New York: Bantam, 1992), p. 51. See also Hugo Cornwall's Hacker's Handbook (London: Century, 1988), which characterizes the hacker as a benign explorer. Cornwall's position highlights the differing attitudes between the US and Europe, where hacking is much less criminalized and in many cases prima facie legal.

[4] Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1984), p. ix.

[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, May 1985, p. 49.

[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.

[7] For an excellent historical analysis of this transformation see Sterling's The Hacker Crackdown. Andrew Ross explains this transformation by citing, as do Sterling and others, the increase of computer viruses in the late eighties, especially "the viral attack engineered in November 1988 by Cornell University hacker Robert Morris on the national network system Internet. [.] While it caused little in the way of data damage [.], the ramifications of the Internet virus have helped to generate a moral panic that has all but transformed everyday 'computer culture. '" See Andrew Ross, Strange Weather: Culture, Science, and Technology in the Age of Limits (New York: Verso, 1991), p. 75.

[8] Knight Lightning, "Shadows Of A Future Past," Phrack, vol. 2, no. 21, file 3.

[9] Knight Lightning, "The Judas Contract," Phrack, vol. 2, no. 22, file 3.

[10] 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 (New York: Routledge, 1999), pp. 32-42.

[11] The Mentor, "The Conscience of a Hacker," Phrack, vol. 1, no. 7, file 3. http://www.iit.edu/~beberg/manifesto.html

[12] Sterling, The Hacker Crackdown, p. 184. [13] Ibid.

[14] Tom Peters, Liberation Management: Necessary Disorganization for the Nanosecond Nineties (New York: Knopf, 1992), pp. 143-144. An older, more decentralized (rather than distributed) style of organizational management is epitomized by Peter Drucker's classic analysis of General Motors in the thirties and forties. He writes that "General Motors considers decentralization a basic and universally valid concept of order." See Peter Drucker, The Concept of the Corporation (New Brunswick: Transaction, 1993), p. 47.

[15] "Introduction," Phrack, v. 1, no. 9, phile [sic] 1.

[16] Sol LeWitt, "Paragraphs on Conceptual Art," in Alberro, et al., eds., Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999), p. 12. Thanks to Mark Tribe for bring this passage to my attention.

[17] See Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1957). See also Fredric Jameson's engagement with this same subject in "From Metaphor to Allegory" in Cynthia Davidson, Ed., Anything (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001).

[18] Friedrich Kittler, "On the Implementation of Knowledge-Toward a Theory of Hardware," nettime (http://www.nettime.org/nettime.w3archive/19 9902/msg00038.html).

[19] Kittler, "On the Implementation of Knowledge."

[20] For an interesting commentary on the aesthetic dimensions of this fact see Geoff Cox, Alex McLean and Adrian Ward's "The Aesthetics of Generative Code" (http://side-stream.org/papers/aesthetics/). [21] Another is the delightfully schizophrenic Ted Nelson, inventor of hypertext. See Computer Lib/Dream Machines (Redmond, WA: Tempus/Microsoft, 1987).

[22] Pierre Lévy, L'intelligence collective: Pour une anthropologie du cyberspace (Paris: Editions la Découverte, 1994), p. 120, translation mine.

[23] Levy, Hackers, p. 53. In his 1972 Rolling Stone article on the game, Steward Brand went so far as to publish Alan Kay's source code for Spacewar right along side his own article, a practice rarely seen in popular publications. See Brand, "SPACEWAR," p. 58.

[24] Richard Stallman, "The GNU Project," available online at http://www.gnu.org/gnu/thegnuproject.html and in Chris Dibona (Editor), et al, Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution (Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly, 1999).

[25] Ross, Strange Weather, p. 80.