Super-Privacy-Protecting ISP In the Planning

h00manist writes "Nicholas Merrill ran a New York based ISP and got tired of federal 'information requests.' He is now planning an ISP which would be built from the ground up for privacy. Everything encrypted, maximum technical and legal resistance to information requests. Merrill has formed an advisory board with members including Sascha Meinrath from the New America Foundation; former NSA technical director Brian Snow; and Jacob Appelbaum from the Tor Project. Kickstarter-like IndieGoGo has a project page."

Comments

License to print money

[Tommy Bologna]

If he pulls this off, he will be very well off. I suspect it will take the dinosaur telcos eons before they understand how to adjust, and by then it just may be too late.

Re:License to print money

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably more like an invitation for an FBI raid.

Re:License to print money

[CodeHxr]

If they* don't just pass a law declaring that this type of operation is illegal.

(* they == anyone with the power [directly or otherwise] to enact/enable such a law)

Re:License to print money

[StikyPad]

If he pulls this off, expect tougher laws on data collection requirements for ISPs.

Re:License to print money

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

Is America Really Free?

11.04.2012 11:43

By Vasily Georgevich

The recent outcry by the American Media complaining of mass riots over the Russian election has gotten me thinking. Do the youth in Russia protesting understand exactly how free they are compared with the American's slandering them? Consider the facts.

1. America's Free Press

Six Corporations control the American press (Walt Disney, General Electric, New Corporation, Viacom, CBS, and Time Warner), whether in print, or on the television. They even used the frequently derogatory term bloggers to refer to free publications that do not follow their talking points. In covering the protest in Russia the supposedly freest press in the world even saw many programs using falls footage, such as those from riots taking place in the European Union, and mimicking those of the Occupy and Tea Party movements happening coast to coast in America.

2. America's Free Speech

If you think you can say anything you want if you're an American consider the American president recently authorized the assassination of an American citizen who was known for recording tapes and CDs denouncing America's policies as immoral, and oppressive.

3. America's Freedom of Religion

Frequently in the last several decades children have had to rely on parents taking schools to court to avail themselves of the right to pray; Churches and Mosques are frequently having to show up in court to preserve their rights to call people to prayer, ring bells, or even maintain a cross that happens to be visible from a public highway.

4. America's Freedom from Taxation without Representation

American's Pay Almost 50% of their income in Taxes, and work the longest hours of any country in the world.

While Americans insist their tax burden is low, once one tallies the taxes on products, housing, transportation, and hidden taxes employers must pay on behalf of employees Americans work 6 months of the year before they see any profit for their labor.

The average American has 2 weeks of paid vacation, and 3 personal or sick days for unexpected absence at work. Many are so afraid of becoming unemployed they do not avail themselves even of these. Expecting mothers in most American jobs are expected to work to within a month of their expected due date and return to work in 6 to 8 weeks. With the effect of so many families where both parents work the prices of American products are such that only if one member of a married couple is independently wealthy it is impossible for them to survive on an income of a single worker. Women are not free to stay home and help raise children, and increasingly many children are raised by daycare workers, and school teachers.

5. America's Open and Transparent Courts, and Corruption Free Police

While other nations are changing the terminology of Militia to Police, America is enacting laws to the opposite. More and more anti terrorism legislation is targeting 'special instances' where American Citizens can be denied indefinitely rights to an attorney, and be held without being charged with a crime. Further these special situaions call for moving ruling on whether these Americans have committed any crime into Military courts which are not subject to the constitutional protections of traditional American courts.

6. Free Elections

International observers are not allowed at American elections, in fact foreigners present at American elections thought to be spying can be charged, and deported and not allowed to return to the United States. Increasingly exit polls conducted on those exiting voting sites in America show disparity with officially reported results; and Americans have little means to investigate why.

The electoral college system in America is legally able to elect whomever they choose for president regardless of whom Americans vote f

Re:License to print money

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Wouldn't a cron job deleting all server and firewall logs every 30 seconds do the trick? They can't subpoena what doesn't exist.

Re:License to print money

[demonbug]

I'm trying to figure this post out - did you put it up ironically, like, "Hey, look how completely uninformed this Russian guy is about the U.S., isn't this funny?" Or were you actually serious? The cluelessness meter is off the charts, but I can't tell if it is a joke or not...

Re:License to print money

[Anonymous Coward]

> Frequently in the last several decades children have had to rely on parents taking schools to court to avail themselves of the right to pray

Typical Alex Jones bullshit. Go to a private school if you want my tax dollars paying for your superstition. And don't make me fund any fucking vouchers for it either.

Re:License to print money

[koan]

ISP's are required by law to maintain logs.

Re:License to print money

[Eponymous Hero]

every 30 seconds? that's stupid. might as well not even keep logs and save the cpu cycles. you don't do this kind of thing for a living, do you?

Re:License to print money

[Anonymous Coward]

I dont think he fails to account for other news medias.
I think he means that the big corporations disparage and disregard the other outlets publicly, calling them bloggers and such, to the point that they slandered out of legitimacy.

-HasHie

Re:License to print money

[Jafafa Hots]

When they say "the right to pray" what the mean is "the right to make others pray, or at least feel marginalized by forcing them to stand out as not part of the group if they choose not to participate."

Anyone can pray anytime, anywhere. A kid can pray in school. What CAN'T happen is the school can;t LEAD A PRAYER and therefore use authority to enforce that religion.

That's what they are really saying, but they LIE CONSTANTLY about it, those moral religious folks.

Re:License to print money

[koan]

http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d110:s.01738:

NOTE: In the fall of 2008, Congress passed Sen. Biden's PROTECT Our Children Act which has a data retention requirement!

Re:License to print money

[Anonymous Coward]

Here is what you want to read.
http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/110/s1738

Sec. 501. Reporting requirements of electronic communication service providers and remote computing service providers.
To
save you time - Nowhere does it claim they HAVE to maintain certain records or monitor etc... in fact they explicitly state that, however once asked for information they do have to provide information they do have and such requests are to handled as a request to preserve records (that do exist at the time of receipt).

Re:License to print money

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry to be off-topic, but this struck a (good) nerve.

I'm glad you don't like vouchers. I don't either, as I think it's a way to send public tax money to private, religious, and charter schools.

Charter schools, by the way, are a calculated mechanism to pay teachers less, break the NEA, and force school districts into bankruptcy by taking district funding without being forced to take any student.

The representatives of charter schools can go door to door for only the kids they want (read: the top-scoring students), and keep doing that until their enrollment is full. This steadily lowers the district average test score and increases their own, and breaks the federal fair-housing act.

For each above-average-test-scores-and-unlikely-to-have-behavioral-issues kid they school they take the average per-pupil cost (in money) from the school district, but that average cost is calculated from a total cost that includes special needs students. So the school districts are forced to educate special needs kids with less money than they would otherwise have, and increases the density of behaviorally-challenged kids who disrupt classrooms and other students in public schools. Additionally, the test scores of the special needs and behaviorally-challenged kids is used to calculate the average test score for a district. If you remove the high-scoring students and increase the number of distractions in each classroom then the average student test score in a school district will go down. This gives the charter school proponents the ability to say that charter schools result in higher test scores than public schools but completely ignores the additional constraints placed on public schools

Charter schools cannot openly discriminate by race or religion by law, but minority and religious (Christian) charter schools are very popular in my area. Charter schools also can selectively advertise to parents of minority students, which can be interpreted (the courts will have to decide) as breaking the federal fair-housing act. Once nearly 100% of students are a minority race in a charter school, other-race students may not feel as welcome, and choose other schools. This is less true (though still true to a certain extent) in public schools, but as public schools cannot turn anybody away due to race and cannot selectively advertise, public schools are much less likely to have a largely homogeneous-race students. This has the effect of reversing integration laws under the banner of parent choice; integration laws that were absolutely necessary, and will likely remain necessary, for integration to be achieved in any meaningful manner.

It is routinely said that school districts control which charter schools can be in their district, but at least in my state (CO), if any district votes to shut down a charter school, the charter school can appeal to the state charter board. A board which is staffed almost entirely with current and former charter school presidents and principles. The board, at least in my state, has rarely allowed any charter school to close, and as such the school districts in my state are hemorrhaging cash left and right. This system gives charter school proponents the right to say that school districts have complete control over the charter schools in their area, but in any historical or practical scenario, a charter school must basically be openly committing fraud to be shut down.

In addition, charter schools can ask states to construct their buildings for them with public tax money, and after a certain number of years (usually ten) the building becomes the property of the company that owns the charter school. This has the effect of giving charter schools and the companies that run them free real estate paid for by taxpayers.

Charter schools do not have to deal with the NEA (teachers union), can hire and fire teachers at will, pay them whatever they want to (which is roughly half what a ~30 year veteran public school teacher makes, which itself is _pitiful_), and does not

Re:License to print money

[koan]

OK I'm wrong, should have just gone to Wikipedia in the first place.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_data_retention#United_States

he United States does not have any Internet Service Provider (ISP) data retention laws similar to the European Data Retention Directive.[19] All attempts have failed:

        In 1999 two models of mandatory data retention were suggested for the US: What IP address was assigned to a customer at a specific time. In the second model, "which is closer to what Europe adopted", telephone numbers dialed, contents of Web pages visited, and recipients of e-mail messages must be retained by the ISP for an unspecified amount of time.[20][21][22]

        The Internet Stopping Adults Facilitating the Exploitation of Today's Youth (SAFETY) Act of 2009 also known as H.R. 1076 and S.436 would require providers of "electronic communication or remote computing services" to "retain for a period of at least two years all records or other information pertaining to the identity of a user of a temporarily assigned network address the service assigns to that user."[23] This bill never became a law. [24]

Re:License to print money

[mcgrew]

Do the youth in Russia protesting understand exactly how free they are compared with the American's slandering them? Consider the facts.

Sorry, but the opinion of the uneducated is of no interest whatever to me. Your "journalist" should learn when, and more importantly when NOT, to use simple punctuation and I'll read his tripe. But what an aliterate says is of no value to me. I'm surprised you'd quote such a rag.

If it was meant as a possessive it should have read "compared with the Americans' slandering of them."

Six Corporations control the American press

Wrong. They do have undue influence, but I just linked to a newspaper (yes, they print paper editions as well) that is not connected to any of them.

Freedom of the press has always been for those with the money to buy a press -- which today, is almost anyone, since the 21st century printing press is a laser printer and the internet.

the American president recently authorized the assassination of an American citizen who was known for recording tapes and CDs denouncing America's policies as immoral, and oppressive.

Link? Oh, there are none. Funny, that.

Frequently in the last several decades children have had to rely on parents taking schools to court to avail themselves of the right to pray; Churches and Mosques are frequently having to show up in court to preserve their rights to call people to prayer, ring bells, or even maintain a cross that happens to be visible from a public highway.

And again, no link. Your Russian newspaper is full of shit. We have Christian churches, Jewish Synagogues, Islamic Mosques, and even a Bhuddist temple in this small city of 110k. Oh yeah, lots of atheists and agnostics as well.

American's Pay Almost 50% of their income in Taxes

There's that misused apostrophe again. Tell that stupid illiterate blogger to go back to the 6th grade. Hell, you'd have done better to link to this. At least I'm literate. Your Ruskie blog reads like it was written by a fourth grader.

Re:License to print money

[Gr8Apes]

This really deserves to be modded down some, but I'll reply:

1) the press is free. Who owns most of it is a different topic.

2) If it's who we suspect, he did more than merely state his opinions. His "recording tapes and CDs denouncing America's policies as immoral, and oppressive" was not why the action was authorized, or many more "assassinations" and arrests would be ongoing.

3) You have the right to pray. You do not have the right to influence or force others to pray. There is a not so subtle difference, Ringing bells can violate noise laws, and none of these are federal issues.

4) Americans do work the longest hours of just about anyone in the industrialized world. (key difference) Federal taxes are not as high as you'd think, mine were roughly 25%, including social security. However, if you want to get to an equal standing with European countries, we do wind up having to "lose"over 50%, to have retirement benefits, health benefits, etc, equivalent to a W European country (albeit that was in the 90s when doing a comparison, it's probably different now, and might be less, in my case at least.)

7) protests following the laws set out for them will occasionally have police breaking the law. Several incidents were recorded and officers were prosecuted as a result dring the Occupy protests. When protesters violate the law, or are no longer "peacefully assembled", then there no longer is a "right" to assemble.

8) Don't know about Americans having a false belief about the gun rights in other nations. However, with the proper paperwork, you essentially can walk into a store and buy automatic weapons. There are also many places they can be used. Note that restrictions of their use is not federally but locally legislated. The Constitution only applies to the feds. If you'll notice, technically the BoR specifically limits the freedoms on a federal level only. It was later amendments and SoC rulings that forced most of them to be also applied at state and local levels.

TFS is confusing.

[idontgno]

Nicholas Merrill ran a New York based ISP and got tired of federal 'information requests'....maximum technical and legal resistance to information requests.

He's tired of fighting The Man, so he's going to set up a new ISP which will let him fight The Man even more? That doesn't even begin to approach making sense. Is this like Fight Club or something?

Re:TFS is confusing.

[Tommy Bologna]

Shhh, we don't talk about Fight Club.

Re:TFS is confusing.

[Karl Cocknozzle]

Nicholas Merrill ran a New York based ISP and got tired of federal 'information requests'....maximum technical and legal resistance to information requests.

He's tired of fighting The Man, so he's going to set up a new ISP which will let him fight The Man even more? That doesn't even begin to approach making sense. Is this like Fight Club or something?

Its actually quite ingenious... He's going to create an ISP where it is much-more-difficult to compromise a users privacy. They're designing it from the ground up to be PATRIOT-Act proof because it will literally be impossible for them to give the feds the data they want. It is fewer fights, but may amount to one HUGE fight with the biggest gorilla on earth, the U.S. Justice Department.

Another possibility, however, is if he gets anywhere close to a working model where this is possible that he suddenly has an "accident," or his data-center suffers a "mysterious fire." Or maybe the CIA kills his network engineers the way Israel kills mechanical engineers they think can build high-speed centrifuges in Iran.

Re:TFS is confusing.

[cdrguru]

Far closer to the idea that he has 100 customers but needs 10,000 to fund the operations. Can something like this ever get enough customers to operate? Not if they charge a penny more than a non-privacy protecting ISP - it simply isn't a priority for most people. A few, yes, and that is all the customers something like this would ever have.

Far too few to make a go of it. No reason for anyone to attack it - it will die of lack of interest.

Re:TFS is confusing.

[Anonymous Coward]

You are missing the obvious business model where he signs up a bunch of pedos/terrorists/ron paul supporters and then sells the info to the feds.

Re:TFS is confusing.

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Its actually quite ingenious... He's going to create an ISP where it is much-more-difficult to compromise a users privacy. They're designing it from the ground up to be PATRIOT-Act proof because it will literally be impossible for them to give the feds the data they want. It is fewer fights, but may amount to one HUGE fight with the biggest gorilla on earth, the U.S. Justice Department.

It is not without precedent. After the PATRIOT Act made it legal to for the feds to confiscate book borrowing records from libraries without even a warrant, most libraries switched over to lending software that deleted all records once a book was returned. So, at worst, the feds could find out what a patron currently had checked out, but no borrowing history was available to anyone.

As far as I know, the DOJ hasn't tried, at least in court, to make a library use a less privacy-preserving system.

Re:TFS is confusing.

[Actually, I do RTFA]

They're designing it from the ground up to be PATRIOT-Act proof because it will literally be impossible for them to give the feds the data they want. It is fewer fights, but may amount to one HUGE fight with the biggest gorilla on earth, the U.S. Justice Department.

Who he already fought. This guy is the same guy who fought (successfully), the national security letter he recieved in 2007.

Re:TFS is confusing.

[Mordok-DestroyerOfWo]

Shhh, we don't talk about Fight Club.

I thought that was Usenet...

Re:TFS is confusing.

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Google it yourself.
But I will point out that your objection is specious. Budgeting doesn't depend on who borrowed a book, only that it was borrowed.

Re:TFS is confusing.

[tinfoiler]

Absolutely, I would love to see how much AT&T has made in the last ten years of selling customer records.

Re:TFS is confusing.

[killmenow]

I thought that was [REDACTED]...

This is why we can't have nice things.

Re:TFS is confusing.

[SomePoorSchmuck]

Google it yourself.

Translation: I don't have a citation.

 

But I will point out that your objection is specious. Budgeting doesn't depend on who borrowed a book, only that it was borrowed.

You specified that *all* records were deleted - which means there's no record of it being borrowed. But getting details wrong is typical when you make stuff up.

Now you're just being an ass.
 
  I spent many years working as an IT manager for academic libraries. Jah-Wren is correct. Subsequent to the PATRIOT Act, almost every library which previously had kept borrower history (and even this was not universal since many libraries already took an aggressive approach to the ALA privacy philosophy) began deleting identifiable borrower information, preserving only statistical data like number of times circulated/browsed/renewed, length of loan, etc. And for academic libraries in particular, the ones who didn't take the PATRIOT Act seriously have taken the same approach due to FERPA concerns.

This isn't rocket surgery, it's a pretty straightforward database tweak to discard certain data and preserve other data. Now, at many libraries the instant a book is scanned (discharged) after return, the system wipes the last user data. This adds an additional hassle in that if you find an item, say, in your curbside drop box, which is overdue/lost, then depending on how your ILS interface works (e.g. does it provide on-screen prompts or errors for such items) you may have to train your staff to immediately stop and record the information on the screen before scanning the next item, or else you'll have an "orphaned" fine/fee on a patron record, because the item was returned and some portion of the patron's fine/fee should be forgiven, but you don't have any way of knowing which patron had the item.

Re:TFS is confusing.

[jarden_from_cerberus]

LMGTFY:
http://www.google.com/search?q=automatically+erasing+a+reader%E2%80%99s+borrowing+record+once+a+book+is+returned
~2 Million Hits

First 5 Results:
Tiffin-Seneca Public Library Privacy Policy
Paulding County Carnegie Library Privacy Policy
Johnson City Public Library Privacy Policy
Mount Wachusett Community College LaChance Library Privacy Policy
Springfield, MA City Library Privacy Policy

Happy?

Re:TFS is confusing.

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

You specified that *all* records were deleted - which means there's no record of it being borrowed. But getting details wrong is typical when you make stuff up.

Lol. Pedantry, the first refuge of the internet idiot.

NSA Director?

[stevegee58]

Former or not, still sounds like a 5th column in the making.

Re:NSA Director?

[lister king of smeg]

i believe it said technical director, not the director. he was they guy in charge of trying to explain computers and what is and is not possible with said computers to the director.

And that is as far as it will ever get

[cdrguru]

Will people pay for supposed "privacy"? Sure, a few would but absolutely not everyone. Or even a majority of people.

The fact that the local police or FBI can subpoena records held by your ISP to find out what you have been doing online and that Google will disclose that you have been researching poisons if your spouse suddenly dies of some rare and obscure poison is irrelevent to most people. Most people more or less figure that if you have been researching poisons and your spouse dies from one that you probably did it and deserve what is coming.

The fact that it is possible - maybe a 0.001% chance - that an innocent person might be caught up in something like this is remote enough to most people to completely discount it happening. Not. Important. For. Them.

If you are downloading movies, music, software, ebooks and whatever else you can grab off BitTorrent today and after a huge legal effort you get caught, well, most people's attitude is (a) I wish I knew how to do that... and (b) sucks to be you. Again, the offender is 99% of the time the person getting nailed and while there is a possiblity of the wrong person getting stuck with the bill we have seen through history that it is rare enough that most people discount it ever possibly happening to them. So it isn't important.

So this can be planned and might attract a few geeky investors. But it is extremely unlikely to survive even one year and probably won't ever be launched. The reality is that almost nobody cares will sink in and doom the project.

Nice idea. Too bad nobody cares. I do not see it affecting mainstream cable companies in the slightest little bit.

Re:And that is as far as it will ever get

[Beardo the Bearded]

I would pay double for my ISP if I got everything encrypted, no server logs, and a great big "fuck you, you warrantless fuck" attitude.

And I live in Canada, where our ISP rates are, "you got a purty wallet..."*
.

.

.

.
*Does not include $5.95 government assraping fee which is not a government fee.**

**This is an actual disclaimer on Roger's agreements.

Re:Good for Snow

[ichthus]

That is, unless it's filled with... bugs. ?? I don't get it.

hello idiots

[Anonymous Coward]

Stop being so USA centric- there is a whole world to put your server- and not just in a dictatorship like america.

It will not work unfortunately for these reasons:

1. he is an american, everywhere you go now the US can get you
2. it is located in America
3. The us government owns the root name servers, hence the internet.

Honey Pot

[walkerp1]

This sounds like the makings of a target-rich nailing list for the Feds. Sure, let them build it. We want to see who comes! Now we can concentrate our not inconsiderable assets on cracking this who's who list of the criminal underworld. Why, it's almost as if they had something to hide...

Re:Honey Pot

[isaac]

The only way this makes sense is as a honeypot, intentional or not.

First, government surveillance of the internet is a solved problem - it's already comprehensive and embedded in the infrastructure of every major carrier and exchange. What good is a theoretically surveillance-free ISP if you can only talk to other customers of the same ISP? The ISP would not be surveillance-free much longer if it ever build any kind of user base.

Second, essentially everyone on the internet leaves - even if they take pains to avoid doing so - a rich data trail with private companies. Facebook, Google, Omniture, CDNs, etc. etc. Data aggregated by these entities render wiretapping at your ISP unnecessary in a lot of cases, and as a bonus may be used against you by private entities for non-criminal matters.

(It's also reasonable to assume that small, mostly-disconnected graphs - i.e. users that successfully manage to communicate only with each other - are inherently of interest from an intelligence or law enforcement perspective. Think of a set of pre-paid phones that only ever call other pre-paid phones, or IPs that only ever communicate peer-to-peer or only visit a single third-party site. Who would ever use the network that way?)

I mean, it's a neat idea and all, but the horse is already out of the barn as far as gov't surveillance goes, and does nothing to address the private data aggregators that are the more real threat to people's lives and livelihoods.

-Isaac

I only have one ISP to choose from!

[GoodNewsJimDotCom]

I have Comcast for high speed internet, or nothing! I don't care if you encrypt my information or send it to the cloud in China, having some competition is better than living in a monopolistic world where the monopolies even corrupt the government

Won't work

[pak9rabid]

The service will probably be ridiculously expensive to cover staff and equipment costs, not to mention the federal, state, and local governments are going to give him a rough time at any chance possible.....but I wish him luck regardless. I just hope this doesn't result in more draconian measures taken by Congress if it does happen to be a success.

Re:Won't work

[allo]

will it not even be cheaper NOT to log?

Spam

[erice]

So are they going to keep enough logging to track down spammers and other abusers on their network?

Fishy

[Hentes]

former NSA technical director Brian Snow

It's a trap!

I think you miss the point of privacy.

[dpqb]

It's something to be preserved for it's own sake. It a way, it enables freedom and preserves the sanctity of the individual.

"Most people more or less figure that if you have been researching poisons and your spouse dies from one that you probably did it and deserve what is coming"

What you're saying that it's ok to have no privacy because someone who is researching *blank* and *blank* happened. probably did *blank* ... it isn't even an argument.

ISP that uses NAT?

[crow]

If the ISP uses NAT instead of real IP addresses for each customer, that would cover the vast majority of issues that currently impact customers. If IP addresses are shared, they can't trace back an IP address to a single account holder.

Short of that, you could set up a localized TOR network that only consists of local users on the same broadband connection, so that it has nearly the speed of a native connection while providing a good deal of privacy. If you had a broadband provider that included that by default in a provided router, that would be great.

Re:ISP that uses NAT?

[allo]

you won't need nat or stuff like tor.
just assign the customer one ip(i.e. from a private range), map it 1:1 to another ip(needs to be public) and it won't even break p2p (open ports, etc.), but if you do not log how you mapped the ips, any ip log of only private/only public ips is worthless.

Re:Why do you need an ISP to do this?

[Ihmhi]

If I were REALLY paranoid, I would get to some place where no one else can see what's going on, inside a Faraday cage, with the person I want to communicate with, in a sound-proofed booth

Ooh, sounds good! Then maybe if the feds come after you, you can detonate pre-installed C4 and blow up the factory that was your hideout because Will Smith made a phone call. Then Will Smith says "AW HELL NAW" and shoots a dude with a shotgun, and you drive away over some train tracks.

Here is why it will never happen

[FlyingGuy]

It is a very simple explanation:

Peering

If he intends to seriously run everything encrypted no Tier 1 provider will peer with him, its that simple.

Even if they wanted to peer with him you can be damn sure the NSA,FBI,CIA and every other 3 letter acronym intelligence agency will have a quiet meeting with some CEO's and that will be the end of it because whether you like it or not there are some people and groups we need to keep tabs on and you really want your government to catch before they do something really nasty and NO this is not about torrents or PB or any other crap like that the CIA and the NSA could care less about.

Re:Here is why it will never happen

[cpghost]

... and NO this is not about torrents or PB or any other crap like that the CIA and the NSA could care less about.

This (naively) assumes the Government is working for the benefit of the People, and not for the Corporations. But is this assumption (still?) true in this day and age? And if it was, how long will it remain true in the foreseeable future?