Inside Comcast's Surveillance Policies

Monk writes "The Federation of American Scientists has obtained a recently disclosed Comcast Handbook for Law Enforcement which details its policies for divulging its customers' personal information. (Here's the handbook itself in PDF form.) All of Comcast's policies seem to follow the letter of the law, and seem to weigh customer privacy with law enforcement's requests. This is in apparent contrast to AT&T and a number of other telecommunication companies, which have been only too happy to give over subscriber records. According to the handbook, Comcast keeps logs for up to 180 days on IP address allocation, and they do not keep all of your e-mails forever (45 days at most). VoIP phone records are stored for 2 years, and cable records can only be retrieved upon a court order. The document even details how much it costs law enforcement to get access to personal data (data for child exploitation cases is free of charge)."

Comments

Re:Secure your email

[spud603]

There's a strong argument to be made to encrypt specifically because you have nothing to hide.
This is similar to the idea that you should not let the cops search your home without a warrant even though you don't have anything illegal inside. The more it becomes assumed that only the "bad guys" that are asserting their rights and/or privacy, the more likely such assertions will be thought of as indicative of bad behavior in and of themselves. If the feds assume I'm a criminal simply because I encrypt my email, then they are not doing their job effectively.

Re:Secure your email

[Ucklak]

Do I have anything incriminating in my email?
No

Do I care if they snoop in my email?
Yes

Will I encrypt my email because they're snooping?
No - in the case of confidential messages, they have always been dealt with cryptically.

Can I do anything about them snooping in my email - regardless if it's encrypted or not?
Absolutely not

Can we do anything about them snooping in my email?
We can try

I am such a low priority for them that as long as it doesn't disturb my day to day routine, I really don't worry about it. I don't even notice if they are even sniffing my packets.

It's like being robbed in your home when you're out. It doesn't matter if you have an alarm system or not, if someone wants property of yours, they will get it.
You can double lock your doors, put bars on the windows, pay for a monitoring service, or whatever, it will not stop a determined person from getting whatever they want to get.

That hassle of behavior is not worth it to me. Supporting a group or honest politician to stop the snooping is worth the hassle.

I'm not going to go downtown and walk across the street out of my way just to avoid the town crier (you know, every town has one, a crazy coot parked in the center of town that says the end of the world is coming). I will confront him if he confronts me.

Re:Secure your email

[Technician]

There is nothing incriminating in my email beyond sending stupid YouTube links to a buddy or bitching to the wife about who chooses whats for dinner.

My stock trades are not incriminating either, but they are not sent plaintext. They are also not sent on my ISP mail servers. Sometimes data security is simply data security to prevent mis-use in the wrong hands. There is nothing incriminating, but my credit card order details is not to be made public.

There is a reason to encrypt some sensitive data. ID theft of credit card information is just one of the many reasons.