Deep packet inspection technology may end up creating a situation where the fourth amendment loses some more of its relevance in the legal system:
The practical problem is that once an ISP takes steps to implement such a system, it will no longer be optional for its competitors to not institute such filtering. A combination of legislation, public pressure and the sort of political grandstanding that has been unleashed against social networking sites "on behalf of the children," will invariably hound all other ISPs into following suit. It's probable that the first ISP to do this will also use the whole thing as a marketing opportunity to claim that unlike its competitors, it operates a "safer Internet."
For the sake of basic privacy rights, I think such technology should be heavily regulated. A "private" surveillance state is no libertarian alternative to a "public" surveillance state. Liberty is not served by creating an environment in which heavy surveillance coupled with automatic reporting to the police is the norm or even legally permissible.
New technologies and changes in U.S. law are adding to pressures to turn Internet service providers into cops examining all Internet traffic for child pornography.Under existing federal regulations, once an ISP gains "actual knowledge" of an incident involving child pornography (and presumably any other criminal offense), it must report that to the authorities. Deep packet inspection technology has the potential to make this process automatic by systematically scanning all of your online transactions for files being transmitted, and thus the ISPs will gain a mountain of evidence against many of their users. On the surface, it's not a bad thing.
One new tool, being marketed in the U.S. by an Australian company, offers to check every file passing through an Internet provider's network -- every image, every movie, every document attached to an e-mail or found in a Web search -- to see if it matches a list of illegal images.
The practical problem is that once an ISP takes steps to implement such a system, it will no longer be optional for its competitors to not institute such filtering. A combination of legislation, public pressure and the sort of political grandstanding that has been unleashed against social networking sites "on behalf of the children," will invariably hound all other ISPs into following suit. It's probable that the first ISP to do this will also use the whole thing as a marketing opportunity to claim that unlike its competitors, it operates a "safer Internet."
For the sake of basic privacy rights, I think such technology should be heavily regulated. A "private" surveillance state is no libertarian alternative to a "public" surveillance state. Liberty is not served by creating an environment in which heavy surveillance coupled with automatic reporting to the police is the norm or even legally permissible.
On a side note, I'd be interested to see how they plan to defeat encryption technology. The only way that I could see that happening would be through a man-in-the-middle attack. Even that would be hard because there are other ways of getting public encryption keys to the people you want to get them to, such as steganography.
A "private" surveillance state is no libertarian alternative to a "public" surveillance state.
The difference is that one is voluntary and the other is not.
There's no "libertarian conundrum" when it comes to adults willfully choosing to do business with an ISP that they know might be snooping on them. As long as there is no fraud involved, and the customers know what they're getting into when they sign up, then they have every right to choose a nosy ISP.
In a free market libertarian scenario, there would be a lot more ISP's instead of the oligopoly we have now. Market choices would abound, and one could choose one's amount of internet privacy.
On a side note, I'd be interested to see how they plan to defeat encryption technology.
This will always be a problem for the internet spies. Information can no longer be controlled. The powers that be can do little that would not severely cripple the internet. And that's what makes it the best invention since the printing press - information is now beyond their ability to control.
True, but as I noted above the "libertarian scenario" will never exist because there are far more non-libertarians involved than libertarians. There clearly is a far more realistic danger of having massive social pressure placed on ISPs to standardize, such that "consenting adults" will find that they actually cannot buy the service unless they buy all of the services needed to roll their own mini-ISP.
The problem with leaving this entirely to the market is that the market will most likely end up making this surveillance involuntary by not tolerating competition that doesn't practice this surveillance. Given the relationship between the state and the ISPs once the surveillance takes place, it's reasonable to say that it is highly problematic for libertarians to just act like the problem exists on the government side.
In reality, once one company goes with it, they all do, regardless of whether or not they install the equipment to do it. This is because once one start tracking, every packet that comes across it will be tracked. If Level3 or AT&T start doing it there is no privacy anymore, unless your ISP and all ISPs that might connect you to your destination also do not snoop. So in affect, there can never be a solution implemented that doesn't risk the privacy of the people.
I should note that this is all already moot as the Gov is already straight copying all traffic at the major hubs. Strong encryption is the best and only hope of maintaining privacy and the ability to communicate without the FedGov reading it all.
As long as it's just the NSA which is reading the traffic, I'm not THAT concerned. Concerned, but not on the order of concern that I would be feeling were it the FBI or a law enforcement agency. Not only is the NSA not allowed to turn over information to the police without serious justification, the NSA is said to have a culture of pretty deep respect for the constitution and the rule of law, all things considered. That wouldn't surprise me, given that I have a done a little work for the military, as most software engineers in the metro DC area have, and the DoD guys are generally straight-and-narrow when it comes to obeying the law and respecting the constitution (NSA is a DoD agency, by the way, and has a lot of military personnel working for it).
Your points about the major hubs are well taken. Unfortunately, there isn't a lot that can be done to keep the federal government from being able to monitor our communications, since public key cryptography is theoretically defeatable by a man-in-the-middle attack. All the federal government has to do is figure out some way to automate the interception of public keys, and it can capture a lot of our traffic and read it.
The only way that this surveillance state can be countered is for people to break into the servers that run the software, and do something pretty terrible to them like flash the boot ROM right off the motherboard.
like flash the boot ROM right off the motherboard.
Much better would be a worm that overwrote the motherboard and every last drive on the machine, after, of course, replicating itself to other such spying machines (o=
That would be crueler for them to deal with, but it has the downside that you would have to know a lot more about the hardware in order to make it possible for the worm to work, since each drive manufacturer uses their own internal designs for things like the controller software inside a hard drive.
but it has the downside that you would have to know a lot more about the hardware
Well since I know not a thing about it now, thats an understatement.