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

[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

[koan]

ISP's are required by law to maintain logs.

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]

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.

[tinfoiler]

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

NSA Director?

[stevegee58]

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

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.

Fishy

[Hentes]

former NSA technical director Brian Snow

It's a trap!

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: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.