It's a privacy-busting boogeyman to civil libertarians, an anti-terror panacea to lawmakers. And now Carnivore, the FBI's infamous Internet surveillance program, has become an inspiration to a group of the Web's leading artists. In a collaborative art project called, creatively . . .
It's a privacy-busting boogeyman to civil libertarians, an anti-terror panacea to lawmakers. And now Carnivore, the FBI's infamous Internet surveillance program, has become an inspiration to a group of the Web's leading artists. In a collaborative art project called, creatively enough, "Carnivore," Flash guru Joshua Davis and digital artist Mark Napier, along with other artists, have crafted programs that create audiovisual representations of data traffic that's observed and hijacked from a local area network.

In the last six weeks, a few of the artists' programs have been making their way to the Web. More will be shown when "Carnivore" makes its public premiere at an exhibition of surveillance art opening later this month at Princeton University. "I wanted to make art that really deals with technology at a core level, art that uses data in its most raw form -- instead of using technology as just a tool to do the same old things," said Alex Galloway, a director at the new media arts group Rhizome that's spearheading the Carnivore project.

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