A consumer group has asked a federal judge to depose top FBI officials in connection with hundreds of documents that could shed new light on the government's controversial e-mail surveillance tool, formerly known as "Carnivore." The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) filed the request on Thursday to determine the existence of papers that would show whether Justice Department conducted a thorough legal and constitutional inquiry into the device before using it in the field.
During a six-month period last year, EPIC used the Freedom of Information Act to obtain nearly 2,000 Carnivore-related documents from the Justice Department. While many of those documents were heavily edited, EPIC General Counsel David Sobel noted that all of the information was related to Carnivore's technical specifications.
The link for this article located at Newsbytes is no longer available.
