Graham is the CTO of NetworkICE, a security company he co-founded with Greg Gilliom and Clinton Lum to provide "anti-hacking" services such as intrusion detection software. Given his family background and his own interests, one could understand that Graham might be interested in anything related to cyber-snooping. But on Tuesday Graham took his involvement to a whole new level, inserting himself directly into the middle of the charged debate over Carnivore -- the FBI's much-maligned system for spying on the e-mails of suspected criminals.

Graham released to the general public the source code to "Altivore," a program that mimics all the capabilities of Carnivore. Part protest against Carnivore's potential for invasions of privacy and part defensive measure aimed at subverting Carnivore, Altivore is the latest escalation of the ongoing battle over just how much privacy we can expect in cyberspace.

Graham, 33, is a veteran of the venerable minicomputer maker Data General. He says that these days he doesn't get out too much, he's too busy taking care of business at NetworkICE. And yet somehow he found the time to write and release Altivore.

Salon caught up with Graham the day after news about Altivore's release broke. He was happy to explain why he created the software, what he feels the real issues raised by Carnivore are and why there should be a fundamental human right to encryption.

What prompted you to write Altivore?

From one perspective, just to poke fun at the FBI. As we describe it, it's like "outing" the FBI. The FBI has kept everything secretive and behind their back rooms and black boxes. We have said: The technology is not as complex as people think. It's actually pretty simple. So we took little bits and pieces from our existing source base of our products -- it's all still "sniffing" -- and dropped it in a new little program called Altivore and shipped the source code for it, so everyone could see how it's done.

Also, to give ISPs [Internet service providers] an alternative to the FBI. The FBI comes up with a search warrant and really, what the FBI wants, is just the data. They don't care how you get it. If the ISP can use Altivore instead, they don't need to have this secretive black box on the network.

Was it much of a technical challenge? You said on your Web site that you wrote it in a weekend.

If I were to write it from scratch, it would take a little bit longer. But since we're copying and pasting stuff that we have already done -- little bits and pieces here and there -- it takes a lot less time.

How long have you been using this sniffer technology?

The three founders of the company have been doing this sort of thing for 10 years. I've done this 10 times before -- for me, even if it was from scratch, it would take me maybe a couple [of] weekends, rather than one weekend. If you're a gymnast, you can do a trick on the parallel bars -- you just go ahead and do it, whereas it would take somebody like me, for example, years to do the same trick.

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