Tool To Allow ISPs To Scan Every File You Transmit

timdogg writes "Brilliant Digital Entertainment, an Australian software company, has grabbed the attention of the NY attorney general's office with a tool they have designed that can scan every file that passes between an ISP and its customers. The tool can '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.' As with the removal of the alt.binary newgroups, this is being promoted under the guise of preventing child porn. The privacy implications of this tool are staggering."

Comments

Probably just for P2P

[clang_jangle]

FTFA:

Here's how CopyRouter would work, according to the company's slide show: A law enforcement agency would make available a list of files known to contain child pornography. Such files are commonly discovered in law enforcement raids, in undercover operations and in Internet searches that start with certain keywords (such as "pre-teens hard core"). Police officers have looked at those files, making a judgment that the children are clearly under age and that the files are illegal in their jurisdiction, before adding them to the list. Each digital file has a unique digital signature, called a hash value, that can be recognized no matter what the file is named, and without having to open the file again. The company calls this list of hash values its Global File Registry.
Whenever an Internet user searched the Web, attached a file to an e-mail or examined a menu of files using file-sharing software on a peer-to-peer network, the software would compare the hash values of those files against the file registry. It wouldn't be "reading" the content of the files -- it couldn't tell a love note from a recipe -- but it would determine whether a file is digitally identical to one on the child-porn list. If there were no match, the file would be provided to the user who requested it. But if there were a match, transmission of the file would be blocked. The users would instead receive another image or movie or document, containing only a warning screen.
The makers of CopyRouter claim that it can even be used to defeat encryption and compression of files in the Internet's Wild West: the peer-to-peer file-sharing tools such as Gnutella and BitTorrent.

This will cause huge latency issues and cost beaucoup bandwidth. ISPs would be shooting themselves in the foot if they did this with all traffic. OTOH, I could see laws requiring such tools for P2P traffic -- in fact that may well be inevitable, with the **AA's "ruling class" status these days.

Re:Probably just for P2P

[TapeCutter]

"My ISP is AT&T. They're not a common carrier?

The AC is correct in what he is saying about common carriers. Check out the registered company name of your ISP and I will wager that it is not AT&T but rather a subsiduary of AT&T (ie: a seperate company in the eyes of the law).

This is how the telco's in Australia with common carrier status get around the rule against sniffing the line, eg: Australia's "Telstra" is not an ISP but "Telstra Big Pond" is an ISP. Since common carrier rules are international I dare say AT&T do exactly the same thing.

Evil

[Anonymous Coward]

According to the Wikipedia entry on Australian copyright law "[...]Brilliant Digital Entertainment in Australia were raided for copyright violations[...]" in 2004.
It looks like someone switched sides but taking a closer look they only seem to be in charge of the adware that came with Kazzaa, so I guess they were always evil.