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Canada To Mandate ISP Deep Packet Inspection
An anonymous reader writes "The Canadian government has proposed new legislation that would require ISPs to install deep-packet inspection capabilities. The proposal includes a laundry list of
surveillance requirements, police review of ISP employees and technologies, and the mandated disclosure of a broad range of
subscriber information without any court oversight."
news: its not expensive. networks TAPS are commodity these days. dpi is something 'every box' does (or plans to do). no longer really a differentiator.
I work in the networking field and over the last 10 yrs I've seen a burst of boxes that offer 'security' and other things but mostly they are there for LI and DPI. its the new fad in datacomm and all the governments are into spying on their people. its profitable to supply boxes to such governments and corporations.
since everyone (vendors) are offering port monitoring, tapping and DPI triggering, it won't be too expensive.
cost is not what we should care about, here. its the widespread use and 'well, everyone else is doing it' acceptance of DPI in our lives. that's what annoys and scares me the most; the fact that its so 'everywhere' now. and it seems only us techies really know this.
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"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
It's very easy to look at the short story and go "The government wants to read my packets?!?!? Oh Noes this must be bad!" Usually that can get a +5 insightful.
I opened the Article to find it was another one from Michael Geist. Now, normally he puts me off, it seems like there was a week or two there where he kept flooding the world with news about ACTA, and I was getting tired of hearing about it because it was the same old thing, bad bad bad. So I started reading the article and the bills that were being proposed - and he actually seems to be on the mark with this one. Basically what the whole thing boils down to is this:
The Law Enforcement Agencies want to be able to read internet traffic, real time, and have access to the information the ISP has on whoever is in that conversation. While some of these details are already within the ISP's ability to give out voluntarily should the Police ask for it, basically they want it set in stone that they MUST. Makes me wonder if there was an issue where an ISP refused to hand over data recently, or if they simple said "We can't sniff their traffic".
Now - I have a strong feeling that this will fail. Why? It seems that they want ISP's to foot the bill. An ISP isn't going to want to pay any more money than they have to. They won't be getting any kind of a kickback from the government - law enforcement isn't exactly a money making industry. So I see Telus and Shaw and Bell and whoever probably starting to grease some palms to make sure this thing doesn't pass.
Unless there is some odd reason that ISP's would willingly want to comply with this (which would mean they're likely getting refunded somehow) then I would be a little more worried. If Geist can find evidence of that, well, that'd be quite a story!
If google have performance issue, smaller sites (that have real users) may well suffer too.
Didn't Google recently claim that https: adds about a whole 1% to the load on their servers? The only computationally intensive part is the initial key exchange.
Corruption of the highest order, when you get right down to it.
Agreed. But don't forget that conservative do-gooders really believe that they are doing the right thing, and cannot see the ironic nature of what is going on. After-all, the unwashed masses need to be controlled for their own good. Moral authoritarianism is as much an ideology as it a business proposition for the private-sector profiting from the "war".
For anybody conservative or liberal who smugly thinks that they are the one who has thought it through, consider this: when identical twins are separated at birth, and tested in adulthood, their political attitudes turn out to be similar with a correlation co-efficient of 0.62 (Bouchard et al. 1990; Eaves, Eysenck, & Martin, 1989; Holden, 1987; Martin et al. 1986; Plomin et al., 1997, p. 206; Scarr & Weinberg, 1981)
So, the next time it seems a political argument is entrench -- consider that it may be far more entrenched then anyone realizes.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right