Electronic Frontier Foundation - EFF recently received documents from the FBI that reveal details about the depth of the agency's electronic surveillance capabilities and call into question the FBI's
controversial effort to push Congress to
expand the Communications Assistance to Law Enforcement Act (
CALEA) for greater access to communications data. The documents we received were sent to us in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request we filed back in 2007 after Wired
reported on evidence that the FBI was able to use “secret spyware” to track the source of e-mailed bomb threats against a Washington state high school. The documents discuss a tool called a "web bug" or a "Computer and Internet Protocol Address Verifier" (CIPAV), which seems to have been in use since at least 2001.
What is CIPAV and How Does It Work?
The documents discuss technology that, when installed on a target's computer, allows the FBI to collect the following information:
- IP Address
- Media Access Control (MAC) address
- "Browser environment variables"
- Open communication ports
- List of the programs running
- Operating system type, version, and serial number
- Browser type and version
- Language encoding
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