Telepocalypse

Wiretrapped

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.)