AT&T's Plan to Play Internet Cop

Ponca City, We Love You writes "Tim Wu has an interesting (and funny) article on Slate that says that AT&T's recent proposal to examine all the traffic it carries for potential violations of US intellectual property laws is not just bad but corporate seppuku bad. At present AT&T is shielded by a federal law they wrote themselves that provides they have no liability for 'Transitory Digital Network Communications' — content AT&T carries over the Internet. To maintain that immunity, AT&T must transmit data 'without selection of the material by the service provider' and 'without modification of its content' but if AT&T gets into the business of choosing what content travels over its network, it runs the serious risk of losing its all-important immunity. 'As the world's largest gatekeeper,' Wu writes, 'AT&T would immediately become the world's largest target for copyright infringement lawsuits.' ATT's new strategy 'exposes it to so much potential liability that adopting it would arguably violate AT&T's fiduciary duty to its shareholders,' concludes Wu."

Comments

How to beat it

[ProteusQ]

We all send copyrighted emails to one another under a license that does not allow AT&T to retransmit the contents without written permission. We then start a class-action lawsuit. IANAL, but that ought to slay the dragon if the judge agrees that the case has merit.

Encryption...

[eggoeater]

Aside from the problem "fiduciary duty", it's also pointless.
True, most traffic is not encrypted, but with encryption technology more accessible than ever I think that the whole effort will be a waste of resources.

I can imagine whole sub-networks cropping up that uses VPN, exchanging traffic with immunity to AT&T's traffic analysis.

Re:Encryption...

[AKAImBatman]

that doesn't work, all they have to know is that some ip address is serving up copyrighted material on a given port and shut of that port for that server.

I think you misunderstand how a Virtual Private Network works. The first thing you must understand is that there is not spoon^W ports. Once you realize that there are no ports, then you only need to route packets over a secure channel that's indistinguishable from valid business. Is this user networking with his small-business employer, or a pirate spreading illegal wares? Impossible to tell from the traffic itself.

Re:Encryption...

[kebes]

If AT&T actually goes so far as to automate man-in-the-middle and spoof all cryptographic key exchanges so that they can decrypt and analyze encrypted content... things are going to get interesting.

For one thing, I imagine financial institutions are not going to take kindly to that kind of action, and could probably mount a very successful class-action lawsuit.

The thing about encrypted traffic is that it could be anything, from confidential business data, to financial transactions, to launch-codes, to a screener of a new movie. As crazy as they are, AT&T will not start playing that game.

The blocking of IP addresses is a more likely counter-attack to widespread encryption, but even then solutions exist (e.g. the TOR network allows routing to servers that have no "non-tor" domain name, so the real IP address is never exposed). It will quickly become a ridiculous arms race...

Re:Encryption...

[rudeboy1]

I wouldn't sweat it. If this sort of policy comes to pass, I'm sure it will take all of about a month for Azureus or whoever to write a modification to the BitTorrent concept, allowing for VPN style connections between peers. Yes, I imagine this would be complicated to set up from a programming stance, but releasing a patch with most largely available BT clients would immediately transform BT as we know it, and would send all these pro-DRM groups back to the drawing board for a while. IANAP, but in concept this seems to be the next logical step anyway.
This is the nature of the internet. The people that innovate in this field are problem solvers, often with a penchant for resiting authority and control. Whenever something like this happens, no matter how detailed or iron-clad the barrier is, someone eventually (or rapidly, more often than not) finds a way to overcome it. Bad code on CDs cause PCs to be unable to read them? Take a felt tip pen and mark the last 1/8" of the disk. DRM protection on DVDs? Here's about 2 MB of code that will overcome any known keys. It's all a matter of time.

time to fund some campaigns

[Original Replica]

at present AT&T is shielded by a federal law they wrote themselves

So they will just write another law. Do you really think that will be a problem for them to get a "children's internet safety" law passed. The government has been practically wetting themselves wanting a seemingly legal way to inspect all internet traffic, this is the opportunity. Nevermind "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated" because this a non-government entity.

How to tell your management structure is broken

[HangingChad]

When really stupid ideas start seeing the light of day. That means most of the management team has insulated themselves from criticism by surrounding themselves with toadies and have, effectively, separated themselves from any semblance of reality.

Usually the case when you see corporate behavior and wonder, "How could they be that stupid?" Because on their little planet what they're doing makes sense. Just not on this world.

In my experience it also means upper management has divided themselves into warring camps.

Re:How to tell your management structure is broken

[FredFredrickson]

It's also a sign- the company has clearly chosen a strategy from the following two:

1. Side with the consumer. In the end it's their money that will make you surpass your competition.
2. Side with legislation. You can legislate yourself a consumer base, that's where the money will be.

It's sad when a company thinks they're so big that they can take option 2. It's fun when option 2 basically kills a company. I wouldn't be surprised if this type of move kills them. Think about it- they're talking about censoring the very basic service that's being offered. It's like they're trying to sell a damaged highway to people, expecting them to take it because the potholes are on purpose. People will vote with their wallets, I hope.

Re:we've already done this to death

[Zerth]

> Guess it's back to carrier pidgins?

I don't know about you, but I much prefer using carrier creole.

Re:Not just copyright ....

[boaworm]

Yea, that's the whole point of the article, you should really try and read it ;-)

Re:Who do I use for Internet access now then??

[acoustix]

This issue isn't just limited to AT&T customers. It affects everyone because AT&T is a tier 1 provider, meaning that they provide backbone access for several ISPs. They are looking to sniff *all* traffic, not just traffic of their DSL customers.

Nick

Another Reason Why AT&T is EVIL.....

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's another reason why this company was broken up in the first place back in the 80's! How in the hell did the FCC and the American Public let this slip past us? Now we are dealing with it again. WTF? When will the FCC learn?

Re:Another Reason Why AT&T is EVIL.....

[computational super]

Remember, this is the same American public which allows (even cheers for) the FCC to decide what you can and can't see and hear.

How and Why AT&T probably wants to do this...

[nweaver]

Time-Warner cable supposidly has 50% of the bandwidth used by 5% of the users. Who wants to bet that of this bandwidth, it is almost all pirated material?

The strength of piracy on the Internet is the ease of getting the pirated material, and the ease of distribution. Thus pirated material must be easy to find. So all the MP/RI-AA has to do is find it, and do something about it. Rather than playing Whak-A-Mole on Torrent tracker servers (which are largely offshore), with ISP cooperation from AT&T it becomes possible to play Whak-A-Mole on the users of the torrents themselves...

So the MP/RI-AA or their contractor surfs the Torrent sites, and connects to the torrents with a manipulated client, verifies that a particular torrent is a copyright violation, maps the users of the torrent, and then sends an automated list of the nodes to the ISP saying "This graph is bad, any edge between two nodes in this graph should be killed", and the ISP simply RST-flood any edge in the graph which crosses its network, or just put in a router ACL to drop that pair for a while. Because the strength of the system relies on it being public and P2P, the MP/RI-AA can easily get this information.

AT&T has multiple incentives to cooperate, and can probably do it safely. It has a second party (MP/RI-AA or a company they create/contract for) do the deciding, so they dont' have the liabliity.

It keeps the content providers happy for when they are negotiating their compete-with-iTunes/Netflix video on demand and cable TV services.

It keeps the content providers from pushing through very draconian legislation, or at least draconian legislation you aren't happy with. (It can F-up your competitors, but thats just a bonus)

Its very easy to implement (short-lived router ACLs which are automatically injected and revoked).

And it drops their bandwidth bills by 30-50% by eliminating a large amount of deliberately-noncacheable (both politically and because of bittorrent encryption) traffic.

I wouldn't take it as a guarentee, but I'd almost be willing to bet that AT&T does something like this in the next year. Who wouldn't leap at a chance to reduce your costs by 30%, keep a group of "partners" you have to deal with happy, and without any real work on your part (just an SNMP-manager program)?

This won't stop closed-world pirates, but those are far less annoying to the ISPs simply because there are so many fewer of them, and less important to the MP/RI-AA because they are less likely to be users you can convert to paying customers if you make the illegal content sources unusable.

Here's how it'll go down...

[glindsey]

AT&T will simply purchase a new law from Congress stating "communications providers are allowed to monitor everything you do and turn you over to the government, but if they happen to miss anything, they are absolutely indemnified." They'll make arguments like "Hey, if the police aren't able to stop a murder from happening, but are shown to be putting forth their best effort to prevent murders, you don't hold the police officer responsible -- so why should we be held responsible if we miss some illegal content?"

And all the legislators will nod their heads and murmur to each other "hey, yeah, they've got a point," while a bag of money passes quietly underneath their tables, and voila, they're allowed -- hell, probably required by the government -- to monitor all traffic and report any and all Violations of the Right to Corporate Profit, and completely immune from prosecution if they happen to miss something.

It'll happen, and the typical "America, Fuck Yeah" voter will grin and gleefully agree that it's for the Good of the Nation, and if you're innocent you should have nothing to hide anyway, so what's the big deal?

The legislators who draft and vote for the bill, meanwhile, will be hailed as patriots and re-elected, again and again, for Protecting the Motherland while simultaneously paying lip-service to smaller government and less federal intrusion into our private lives.

I abhor the fact that my daughter is going to grow up in this pathetic shell that America is today.

Re:we've already done this to death

[Anonymous Coward]

about common carrier status

And as many replies stating that AT&T's internet service is not common carrier, dammit! They lobbied hard to make sure it was that way, because maintaining common carrier status is fucking expensive (what, you think having a dialtone every single time you pick up your phone without having a window where the phone company can say "ok! nobody make a call, we're going to reboot some switches!" is cheap?!), and because violating the common carrier rules doesn't mean you "lose common carrier status", it means you go to jail. Think about that, some guy at the post office reading your mail doesn't mean the post office stops being a common carrier, it means the guy goes to jail.

This is why they have to have special laws with exceptions written just for them that protect them from being sued!

Re:How and Why AT&T probably wants to do this.

[kebes]

Your post outlines a possible means by which AT&T will stop bit-torrent traffic. It seems workable and realistic, and AT&T may very implement it (despite the obvious ramifications: e.g. if they block everything listed on PirateBay they will block many sanctioned/legal file transfers).

But the P2P community will fight back. It will become an arms race. For example:
-Trackers inject all kinds of bogus data into the trackers, crafted so that humans skip over it but automated crawlers choke on the massive amount of data (and RST packets!) they must deal with. For added fun, the bogus data includes IPs of legitimate company services, so AT&T will be interfering with, e.g. Blizzard downloads.
-ISPs adjust their software to differentiate "real torrents" from "fake torrents."
-Trackers begin accumulating lists of IP addresses and other signatures that detect the ISP bots, and feed them bogus data.
-ISPs use their control of IP blocks to fake requests from different IPs.
-P2P software starts ignoring RST packets, and uses a different (encrypted) protocol to open/close sessions.
-ISPs give up sending RST-floods, and instead drop all packets.
-Trackers implement algorithms that keep track of "user contribution" based on swarm participation (transmitting valid packets), and block/throttle clients with no "reputation." This makes it difficult for the ISPs bot to browse the torrent listing without actively participating in valid torrenting.
-ISPs switch to checking what IP addresses a person connects to, and simply stalls any connection (all traffic) that connects to a tracker site.
-Trackers switch entirely to TOR: they have no public IP address or domain name. All tracking requests go through TOR routing using the ".onion" pseudo-TLD.

And so on...

My point is this is a crazy arms race, and one should not enter that kind of battle until analyzing all the possible counter-attacks. And the difference here is that hackers will view this as a challenge, whereas AT&T will be spending literally millions of dollars implementing technologies that become invalidated over and over.

Re:we've already done this to death

[Cheerio Boy]

Does Speakeasy offer DSL in your area? That's what I did until I could go with RCN. Speakeasy DSL costs more, but they have highly technically skilled customer support people, an expectation that their customers run servers, and a rock-solid network. I highly recommend them.

Your packets will still likely go through an AT&T network and thus still be inspected.

Because AT&T is so large this will affect a good chunk of the Internet - especially US networks.

Hell their backbone runs the entire length of the us.

This map is from 2000 so it's probably much more invasive now:

http://www.cybergeography.org/atlas/att_backbone_large.gif

Re:we've already done this to death

[Tetsujin]

Nah, carrier Swallows. I'll bet she does... Oh yes...