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Canadian ISP Shoulder Surfing
1nfamous writes "Canada's Largest ISP, Bell Sympatico, has informed its customers that it intends to 'monitor or investigate content or your use of your service provider's networks and to disclose any information necessary to satisfy any laws, regulations or other governmental request.' The new customer service agreement is effective June 15, 2006."
I wonder how long before people start being bothered by this kind of behaviour?
And I don't mean us, but the majority of sheeple...
Will it be too late then?
Ignore this signature. By order.
start your encryptors.
If you are a capitalist and believe in "the magic of the marketplace", you have to believe that this trend will eventually result in ISPs who advertise the opposite: that they don't snoop, that they dump any logs within hours or minutes, and so forth. That is, if they are allowed to do so by law.
http://www.privcom.gc.ca/legislation/02_06_01_01_
They're simply NOT allowed to do this without a warrant if you refuse to consent to it. Simply send them an email stating that you do not consent to their unlawful search, and cc the privacy commissioner.
If they say "these are our TOS, don't like it, leave" - that's not good enough. Their contract is a contract of adhesion, and as such, unconscionable and onerous clauses can be struck from it. Certainly claiming a right to violate PIPEDA is one such clause.
See, there's the difference between America and Canada.
We make sure that the customer's don't know when we're spying on them.
The chief difference between Canada and America? At least the Canadians get fair warning.
June 15th, the date this went into effect, was two weeks ago, and the Globe and Mail article was posted yesterday. So either Bell Sympatico told people with little to no warning, or the Globe and Mail didn't bother to run this until everything was said and done. Either way, this sucks.
The question is: if this ends up carving a huge dent in Bell's market (which it probably won't), will the lesson be "People don't like being monitored" or "People don't like knowing they are being monitored?"
"Shoot for the moon, even if you miss, you may hit a tree"
HTTP:
HTTPS:
To help you surf the web without being spyed on I recommend installing Tor then installing FoxyProxy.
Tor takes care of the proxy encryption, and FoxyProxy lets you use all those proxies while you surf.
Invaluable for the privacy conscious, or rather anyone living in the 21st century.
Meet new people, and kill them.
Unfortunately 99.99% of internet users have no clue about encryption, they have never heard of PGP, probably don't know when they are even viewing an https page. The mass bumbles along in ignorance and any attempt to educate them is blocked by an enourmous inertia of apathy.
It would take several years of media coverage about invasion of privacy and some high profile cases before the masses would rise from their slumber and do something about Bell Sympatico. It's the same as what the US government (and the UK government) are doing to strip away freedom in the name of security.
It's sad but true, if you understand the issues you are in a tiny minority. Don't expect and change anytime soon.
while sco {
wget -O
}
No, HTTPS is just the HTTP application protocol transacted across an encrypted (SSL or TLS) TCP transport protocol. The only data passed in the clear is the IP#s of the remote endpoints. Once connected, the client requests the server send the identified object (eg. "GET /home_explosives.html HTTP/1.1") during the encrypted transaction.
Of course HTTPS is vulnerable to traffic analysis and attacks on HTTPS itself, but proxies and tunnelling protect HTTPS even more.
The increase in HTTPS would come from the public perception of HTTPS as more private, hindered only slightly by imperfections in the protection.
--
make install -not war
There are virtually no restrictions on the use of cryptography or encryption technology in Canada. Famously, this is the reason that the OpenBSD project is based in Canada and not the US - the extensive use of encryption in OpenSBD would mean that, amongst other things, if it were US-based its development and distribution would be severely curtailed. People distributing the software may technically even be arrested, depending on how stringently their laws were interpreted.
This proposed "warrantless" internet surveillance bill will encounter a great deal of resistance in Canada, and with a minority government it's passage is by no means guaranteed. In the event that it does become law, at least people can encrypt anything & everything they send over the internet. A law such as this, however, would be challenged in the courts almost immediately here.
If you use Tor, you're actually going through a sequence of several proxies, using different encryption keys for each hop along the route. The first proxy in the chain knows who you are, but can't see where you're going; it can only see the next proxy in the chain. The last proxy in the chain can see where you're going, but it doesn't know who you are, because all it can see is the previous proxy in the chain. Those in the middle can't see either the origin or the destination.
Unless an attacker manages to compromise all the nodes along your route (which changes every few minutes), the Tor network can't figure out who was going where.
You sir, seem to be under the mistaken assumption that this, or any other, "War on Terror" program is actually aimed at terrorists. As you point out, any real terrorists/hackers/bad guys can find a multitude of ways around all of these systems. In fact, if you are actually doing anything deliberately illegal, you must assume that you are being evesdropped on at all times, and so make all of your contacts as innocuous as possible. That's basic subversion 101.
All of these "programs" are to make sure that those in power have something on everybody. That way when you actually do something that interferes with their agenda or makes someone with power mad at you, they can nail you on several unrelated charges and keep their actual agenda somewhat obscured.
As to your point, this very post could, at some point, come back to haunt me. But everytime I state these very obvious facts in a public forum, it would be terribly inconvenient for me to have to "format my shit" to avoid prosecution. The problem with the GP's idea of rotating encryption, is that only works where both ends of the conversation are trusted entities. If I were in Canada, and searching the web for information on something of dubious legality, like growing strains of South American botanicals north of the 48th parallel (hey, I like orchids), this would raise a flag somewhere in a database with my name on it. If later I searched for and made posts in support of opposition candidates and positions (whoever the "opposition" of the day was), that would also go into the file. If I was later surfing "fine art" sites and a link farm popped a window with underage models up, bang. You guessed it, a note into the file. When I did something annoying enough to the monitors, they would select the most convictable of possible offenses, get a warrant for a "secret search" and "discover" illegal content on my PC. Evidence clearly substantiated by the logs provided by my ISP.
See how easy it is. If I were actually doing anything deliberately illegal, I would go to great lengths to protect myself. It's the poor buggers that think they are within the law that will get hammered unsuspectingly.
"Unheard of means only it's undreamed of yet,
Impossible means not yet done." ~~ Julia Ecklar