Hang on a minute. Your ISP may want to charge you extra for hosting a server, or may want to deploy bandwidth shaping to throttle your P2P traffic. But who gave them permission to look beyond the IP headers?
Those TCP and UDP headers aren’t needed to route the packet. Why isn’t this an illegal wiretap? How on earth are Cisco et al getting away with selling deep packet inspection tools for public networks? Are terms of service that give your provider a blanket wiretap authority enforceable? How come?
Reader advice sought: is this actually legal in your jurisdiction? If so, how come? If not, why isn’t the wiretap law enforced? How come people aren’t up in arms about the privacy invasion?
(Note that intermediation services like Akamai’s web caching are OK; although they “intercept” your packets, the packets have in fact reached their final destination. It just turns out that the IP address of, say, the Yahoo home page is a logical address, not a physical one. It’s not a wiretap if the recipient authorises it.)
Posted by Martin Geddes at 09:47 AMTrackBack URL for this entry:
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Another Geddes mindbomb - Do ISPs have the legal right to inspect your packets and throttle your traffic as a result? from Peer 1 Blog
2nd mindbomb of the day for me from Martin. Hmmm.
From Telepocalypse by Martin Geddes: Wiretrapped.:
QUOTE
Hang on ...[Read more] Tracked on February 12, 2005 12:26 AM
Yeap, Martin, yeap...
When you see all the presentations of Equipment providers' next products it's all about new "services" that make the networtk "intelligent" aka that SLOW the trafic TO INSPECT DEEPLY in IP Packets to DISCRIMINATE USERS and administrate the scarcity with "differentiated services" etc...
The shame is that these slides shows WILL INTEREST the operators : the old eternal "Best network paradox" of Isenberg....
You know, I think there is good parallelism with the computing Hardware industry : once you had a company that create a new concept "microprocessor" and tried to do one thing good : break performance limit endlessly. They did not bother about applications, services...they just said "ok guys, every 18 months you will have a new performance limit at THE SAME PRICE"
Did this company collapse by the commodity ? DAMN NO !!
Intel have become a multi-billions profitable company !!
BUT recently they have SWAPPED : they said : "OK guys, power is not good enough and we will provide you additional services (radio, energy, graphics...)". AND BANG, they will be perhaps HIT TO THE GROUND by the new CELL from IBM that just add...HUGE MORE POWER !!!
So what if an operator thought about Stateless IP Network Brute Performance aka the "average latency from point A to B" ? They could say "ok guys, every 18 monthes, you will have latency reduction AT THE SAME PRICE"
How to call that ? the Geddes-Boyreau Law ?