Major ISPs Help Fund BitTorrent User Tracking Research

Posted by Soulskill on Monday March 8, 2010 @11:15AM from the santa-and-comcast-both-know-if-you've-been-naughty dept.

An anonymous reader writes "I was scanning conference proceedings to come up with ideas for a reading group I run at my workplace, and I noticed an interesting paper from the new IEEE WIFS forensics conference. Researchers from the University of Colorado have published a technique for tracking BitTorrent users (PDF) by joining and actively probing torrent swarms using low-cost cloud computing services. They claim their methods allowed them to monitor the entire Pirate Bay torrent set for as little as $13/mo using EC2. But that's not even the interesting part. Their work appears to have been 'funded in part through gifts from PolyCipher' — a broadband ISP consortium. That's right; three major national ISPs funded this round of BitTorrent tracking research, not the MPAA/RIAA. Could this be evidence of ISP support for ACTA and a global three-strikes law?"

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Re:It could be related to ACTA, or. . . by ravenscar · 2010-03-08 11:47 · Score: 5, Informative

Warrants are for the government. When you signed your contract with your ISP you likely authorized them to monitor your traffic to some extent (at least bandwidth usage and likely more). Does that violate your privacy? Maybe, but the issue is much more complicated than you make it seem.