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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)."
Complying with requests from "Law Enforcement" is quite a bit different from complying with requests to assist a US government agency with an anti-terror program. Local law enforcement is far removed from the latter.
/.'ers? They still haven't changed thier undocumented policies related to bandwidth limitations on "unlimited bandwidth" accounts.
Is this an attempt to improve Comcat's poor reputation among
Internet, Voice, TV. All on one subpoena.
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.