US ISPs urged to snoop on traffic

NY Attorny General promotes deep packet inspection to AOL.

ISPs in the US are coming under increasing pressure to impose deep probing of all their customers' traffic, with the Attorney General of New York passing details of one system of deep packet inspection to major provider AOL.

While the government's intentions are to control and prevent the spread of child pornography, such proposals have come up against strong opposition on privacy grounds, especially so in this most recent case as the product in question was developed by a company formerly associated with spyware.

The product pushed by the NY representative was CopyRouter, develpoed by Australian firm Brilliant Digital Entertainment, who in the past produced intrusive adware software running on the Kazaa peer-to-peer system which many security products detected as malicious spyware. The case has echoes of the ongoing saga of UK telecoms giant BT, several other leading ISPs, and their plans to implement data snooping software Phorm.

A full analysis of the situation and the latest developments are in an MSNBC report here.

22 October 2008

Tags: aol, deep packet inspection, legal, phorm, privacy, snoopware. del.icio.us digg this

3 comments

We have a CALEA Probe (snoop probe) built into our commercial bandwidth shaper with about 1000 of them in the field at commercial Tier2 and Tier3 ISPs. We have yet to hear about any customer being requested to turn this feature on (for any purpose). Yes this is an emotional topic, but it is just an extension of the wiretap laws already in place. I suppose it can be abused but at least this is above board requiring a subpoena.

art reisman

www.netequalizer.com

by astormchaser, 23 October 2008, 01:06

Its only a matter of time until there is no such thing as spyware and our ISPs will sell our browsing stats to the highest bidder. Like all changes it will take some time but like the previous commenter stated, the system is already in place. Another issue is that the current technology for government sanctioned DPI is moving more towards automated and away from physical switches, making them more vulnerable to remote exploitation and even local exploitation.

by AtomSmasher, 25 October 2008, 02:34

Why worry about our ISP's selling our browsing stats? Just use Google. They already track your search topics and frequency (in order to better anticipate a users needs). Couple that with the average individual's lack of knowledge concerning internet security and BIG BROTHER is already looking in the window. Could it be that the majority of these under/uninformed users continue to use AOL (not to mention the plethora of kids on AIM) that prompted them to approach AOL in the first place?

by Gunny, 20 November 2008, 21:48

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