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US Marshals Service Refuses To Release Already-Published Stingray Info
v3rgEz (125380) writes The U.S. Marshals Service is known to be one of the most avid users of StingRays, and documents confirm that the agency has spent more than $9 million on equipment and training since 2009. But while it appears the USMS is not under any nondisclosure agreement with the device manufacturer, the agency has withheld a wide range of basic information under an exemption meant to protect law enforcement techniques — despite the fact that that same information is available via a federal accounting website.
about Stingray is you don't talk about Stingray...
Let's see how fast they can shut down that accounting website . . . .
Hopefully this article will help make it ubiquitous. Barbara Streisand effect in effect.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
then what are you bitching about?
We only answer to.. ourselves.
What is America becoming?
Each agency has a set of rules and procedures for releasing information. Just because one group allow the release doesn't mean a different one - with a different mission - has the same rules.
Think of it as a set of NDAs. Your CFO may have given proprietary information to investors, but that doesn't mean you can talk about it at the cocktail party after work. Not even to said investors.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
If we trust FCC to ensure "fairness" of Internet Service Provision:
why don't we trust the Marshals Service to be fair as well? Are they being controlled by a different President or something?
People here are kind of like John Kerry, they were in favor of the Government before they were against it.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
WE DONT trust them, thats why we didnt push hard for regulation in the 90s. The latest FCC actions were DECADES in the making. SO to the uninformed like you it might seem like we are championing the FCC, when in reality we are fucking giddy to see our enemy take such a hard strike against them. No informed person thinks this was the best choice, it was the only choice the ISPs left us with.
Good-bye
One agency in a sprawling, over reaching federal government has no idea what another agency in the same sprawling, over reaching federal government is doing? Shocking.... News at 11:00
Well, there goes the idea that US Marshals are as cool as Raylan Givens.
The FCC is an independent agency and does not answer to the President. Put it this way, Obama can't fire Wheeler without just cause. He does not work "at the pleasure of the President".
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
We support the government when it acts in the interest of the public, and oppose it when it acts against the interest of the public. Is that really so goddamn hard to understand?!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
The FCC is an independent agency
Congress could defund them before end of business today if they were so inclined.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
How does a stingray connect to the network? Im assuming it support data so if I get hooked into one, how do they hook into the backhaul?
The latest FCC actions were DECADES in the making.
Using a law that was first written when your telephone had a hand crank and last updated when 33.6kbit/s voiceband modems represented the "bleeding edge" of consumer internet connectivity.
This op-ed raises an interesting question: "The real issue is who pays for new Internet investment. Do big users like Netflix and Facebook bear some costs or are these left to the ISPs -- which shift them to the monthly bills of households? For example: In 2014, Netflix agreed to pay Comcast for smoother streaming of its videos. The open question is whether the FCC will permit these interconnection payments and, if so, at what level. But the FCC has weakened the ISPs' bargaining position by requiring them to accept all comers."
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
You *do* know that more than one person posts to Slashdot, right?
Case in point: the post you quoted was written by 'allquixotic', while here you're claiming that 'spire3661' is somehow bound by that post.
He does not need to fire him — he just hired him in the first place. FCC is part of the Executive branch and the commissioners are appointed by the President.
Do you not think, full agreement with the President is one of the job-requirements for the Chairman? It better be, or else the President is not doing his job...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Your an idiot for holding one person responsible for another's post.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
We support the government when it acts in the interest of the public, and oppose it when it acts against the interest of the public
Obligatory car analogy: Toyotas mostly get people around just fine. They had a problem with uncontrolled acceleration. It happened a few times with bad consequences. They were shady and tried to hide it but finally came clean. So people still drive Toyotas and the acceleration problems are fixed.
Now ... imagine that there were at least three stories a day about people being killed by malfunctioning Toyotas and then we found out that Toyota was using its onboard electronics to record everything everybody who rides in them is saying, to be used against them in the future, and remotely detonating a few of them every few days. Most people still get from point A to point B, but still a bunch of people are getting killed because they own a Toyota.
We'd stop driving Toyotas and their resale value would fall to almost zero. It's good that we have Honda and Nissan and Tesla (et. al) to choose from, because we could quickly and relatively easily make that choice.
Now, what do you do when Toyota is the only car manufacturer and they're constantly running people into brick walls at high speed, and the frequency is increasing rapidly? Why should they even bother fixing the problems?
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
With enough people using SnoopSnitch ( https://play.google.com/store/... ), which detects Stingray cell phone trackers, and a collection site on Facebook or any other social media site (Reddit sounds like a good candidate), the locations of these things could be mapped and published in jig time.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
"If you can't trust the governments of the world, who can you trust?" - Young Einstien
Your an idiot for holding one person responsible for another's post.
Glass houses my friend, glass houses.....
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
I wish I had mod points just for the car analogy.... :)
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
I long for a police force whose sole task is to protect the clear meaning of the Constitution, with the authority and balls to arrest any federal employee or contractor.
(Not really. I have not idea that it would work out well. But a girl can fantasize...)
Anyone who uses force and evades investigation, responsibility and punishment is indistinguishable from a criminal.
I fear many LEOs have forgotten their job is not to catch bad guys but to create respect for the law by enforcing it impartially and in a manner seen by all to be correct.
It's not that we want the FCC regulating network neutrality, but more like we were pushed into that corner.
In an ideal world, the market would work out any network neutrality issues and the government wouldn't need to get involved. For example, if ISP A degraded Netflix traffic in an effort to promote their video offerings and get Netflix to pay them, then ISPs B, C, and D would stand ready to pick up the customers who fled due to bad Netflix connections.
We're not in an ideal world, however, and the market is broken beyond repair (at least near-term repair). Right now, I have a choice of one ISP: Time Warner Cable. Most Americans have only one ISP or, if they are lucky, two to choose from. (Side note: Wireless doesn't count because the data charges make streaming videos an expensive proposition. You can't argue that an alternative to buying a small, somewhat affordable car is buying a $1 million tricked out limousine.) This means that an ISP can do what it wants knowing that its customers have nowhere to flee. If customers can't vote with their wallets, there is nothing reigning in the company from doing whatever it wants to do.
Even with this situation, we could have avoided government regulation, but the ISPs got greedy. They started complaining about Netflix getting a "free ride" (they pay for their own bandwidth fees the same as anyone) and tried charging Netflix to not be slowed down ("that's a nice web service you've got there... It'd be a shame if something HAPPENED to it..."). Needless to say, there was a frustrated outcry.
EVEN then, the FCC tried to enact some weak regulations that would have effectively let the ISPs do whatever they wanted. Verizon sued to get those regulations overturned and succeeded. The courts said the FCC would need to use Title II. Which they just did.
The ISPs backed us into this corner with their own actions. We didn't want to be here but they didn't give us any other choice.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
This is like saying those silly ancient greeks and their democracy....No one could possibly draw inspiration from a 2000 year old system of governance...
Good-bye
That reminds me. Weather.gov still refuses to admit that it snowed out yesterday. It freaking did! I saw it! I WAS THERE! IT SNOOOOOWED!
Some of us have worked on the ISP side of the house (disclosure: I worked for a small one that was crushed by Time Warner a long time ago) and view the Netflix debacle in a different light. Netflix has a history of trying to pass their costs onto third parties, by abusing settlement free peering, pushing their "Open Connect" devices on ISPs without offering to pay the usual co-location expenses, or trying to cheap out on envelopes that wound up jamming in sorting machines and causing USPS all manner of difficulties. That one turned into a major spat as I recall, with USPS having to threaten to revoke their bulk mailing/pre-sort price discounts before Netflix was willing to back down.
The long standing model for internet traffic has been sender pays. If you're dumping more traffic into my network than you take off my hands you pay me to get it closer to its destination. If you're taking more off my hands than I'm taking from you then I pay you. In the final example, we exchange roughly equal amounts of traffic and agree to do so without remuneration.
Is that model still valid today? It's hard to say. It did build the internet as we know it today, for better or worse. It would be easier for me to be sympathetic if this wasn't a pissing contest between Netflix and ISPs. The arrogance of Netflix is truly astounding, from my perspective as someone who worked in the ISP business, and I see it as billionaires arguing with other billionaires about who should foot the bill for their respective business models.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
I can accept this analogy but it is not airtight. We do have elections, so we can change out the parts of the government that we don't like. So it is almost like having competitors for government; instead we have competitive ideas. Government is slow to respond because we have a largely apathetic citizenry that does not drive it to respond more quickly.
Sometimes, when I'm in one of my nastier moods, I think a solution might be for those who do vote to approve by referendum a $1000 per capita excise tax on all eligible adults who don't vote.
I have worked with classified documents for decades. If something is classified, you cannot release it until it is declassified.
Even if it was already leaked, and the person asking for the information is waving a copy of it in your face. If you do, you lose your job in the least, and serve some time in prison at the worst.
Works the other way around. Several newspapers are blocked in government systems because if an unclassified machine (any with internet access will be unclassified) browses one of the news articles that contained a leaked document that machine is now contaminated with a classified document and has to be wiped. Because that machine is not cleared to hold that document- no matter where it came in to the machine from.
The president and the federal government can get their way even with laws that provide separation. Ask any state that tried to ignore the "national" speed limit of 55.
"You trust the FCC, so why don't you trust the angency i troll for? No fair!
It's nothing at all like that. I merely question the wisdom of applying a law that was originally written before WW2 to the internet. If you believe there's a problem it would be far better to lobby your Congressman to address it through the Congressional power to regulate interstate commerce. The proponents of this action will argue that Congress is generally useless (at least we agree on something) but I've never been a big fan of "the ends justify the means" as an argument.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
"People here"..? spoken like a true, disgruntled outsider.
Actually, I would say we can't trust law enforcement these days ... because when law enforcement cites a corporate NDA to not be able to tell us how they're using software which is designed to violate your constitutional rights ... law enforcement is fucking lying to you.
Law enforcement is consistently trying to hide what they do, consistently saying the law means what they say it means, and consistently ignoring the constitutionality of what they do, and colluding to commit perjury by hiding the truth about how they found certain information.
When law enforcement stops caring about the law ... it's time to stop treating them with trust or respect.
Pretty much all law enforcement these days feels it operates in a special magic bubble.
The rest of us say "fuck that, follow the low, or be charged under it".
General warrants, probable cause, free from unreasonable search and seizure ... these things tell me most people in law enforcement are committing treason.
So, no, we cannot fucking trust law enforcement. Because they are no longer trustworthy.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
"Netflix agreed to pay Comcast"...? What a delightfully contrived way to paint comcast holding netflix and its customers hostage.
On this subject I am; any and all argument against the FCC's action is immediately given the same treatment by moderators as a GNAA post.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
So that's why we need a 300+ page law?
The danger of government network neutrality laws has always been miss-regulation.
What happened to the one paragraph law 'No Internet service provider may accept any payment from any web site or service to prioritize data'?
Leaves their hands free to QoS and fuckwit disconnection purposes, while preventing them from charging for access. Of course they could make their own local servers seem better by just under-building their network. But laws can't fix everything.
Note: We want Netfilx to continue to deploy servers as close to end users as possible. Any law that prevents Netfilx from renting some server space in Comcast's data center is counterproductive.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
There isn't an ISP in the world that promises you any specific amount of bandwidth beyond their network, even for business class connections with SLAs and a 1:1 contention ratio. Any ISP that made such a promise would be lying to you, because they can't control the actions of those networks that they interconnect with. You might do well to learn what the internet actually is; it's a collection of networks that are interconnected. Each network is operated by different people, who can only control their own actions, not those of the partner networks they're interconnected with.
If Netflix wants to reach Comcast's customers they have two choices:
1. Buy transit from someone that has sufficient peering capacity with Comcast to hand off Netflix's anticipated peak hour traffic load.
2. Buy connectivity directly from Comcast.
They've selected Option #2, presumably because it was cheaper than Option #1. What Netflix actually desires is Option #3:
3. Comcast installs Netflix's caching boxes ("Open Connect") free of charge, without remuneration for rack space, physical security, or even electricity, never mind the bandwidth that they consume within the Comcast network and at Comcast's peering points with other providers.
There are a ton of arguments for network neturality that I can get behind, but "My Netflix is slow!" is not one of them. This is one billionaire (Hastings) arguing with other billionaires (Verizon, Comcast, et. al) about who should pay for the other man's business model.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
I wonder what the author thinks the ISPs will do? They'll most likely continue to bill the household at the existing rate (because it's what the market will accept), citing the need for further investment in hardware. They'll also bill the various service providers for using their network, which was already paid for by the users.
You're not really in a nastier mood, you're just demonstrating stupid naivety.
The various US federal government agencies are all filled with *people*, all different kinds of people. You can't even expect the people in the agencies under the same department (such as Treasury's IRS versus Treasury's OCC) to act the same; those in different departments are even more divergent with different cultures. The FCC is under the Commerce Department, NSA is part of the Department of Defense - they don't have anything in common until you reach all the way up to the President. And if you think that the President has any direct control over the people in any given agency, you seriously misunderstand the bureaucracy that is the US federal government (and probably other country's governments as well).
Your law enforcement agencies are different than your national intelligence agencies. So FBI and NSA have different motives and agendas, and will act different in some ways because of this. However, they both also like to keep things secret, because, well, it makes it easier to do their job if they do. So the FBI seems to avoid posting details of their ADP systems of record in the federal register, because, well, it might give something away. They also don't always provide the ability to see records that they hold and to correct those records as required under the Privacy Act, because, well... it might give something away. And the NSA will act like them in this regard, for the same reasons.
I'm not surprised that the folks at a national law enforcement or intelligence agency might overuse the excuse of "law enforcement sensitive" when redacting or refusing to disclose information. Its a strong habit, it leaves as little information to be disclosed publicly as possible, and that just makes for less trouble down the road in general. (The old line about "nobody ever gets fired for buying IBM" might be re-stated here as "nobody ever gets fired for redacting too much information" when you are in a law enforcement/national security agency.)
On the other hand, the FCC is under the Commerce Department, which is far away from the NSA or the Marshall's service. The FCC in general has a different mandate and point of view about what they do. They aren't so much about keepings things secret as they are about keeping things orderly and under control. Violate radio licensing and the FCC is there to reign you in. Violate the public trust (as the FCC sees it) and the FCC is there to reign you in.
Whether or not you can "trust" any particular federal agency depends on what you are trusting them to do. I think you can generally trust a law enforcement agency to do whatever they think is necessary (and usually legal) to enforce the law as they think it should be enforced. You can't trust a law enforcement agency to be any more forthcoming about their methods, tools, and data than they absolutely have to be. I think you can generally trust the FCC to enforce communications standards as they think they should be enforced, which will include trusting them to hold broadband Internet access service providers to the applicable rules under Title II of the Communications Act.
I don't think having these expectations is in any way schizophrenic.
Why should they even bother fixing the problems?
Dead people buy fewer cars?
Installing Open Connect means Comcast avoids costs in maintaining higher capacity edge routers, and can place the caching boxes wherever is efficient for their own network topology. For example, if placed in each geographic region hub, it means their own long-haul trunks are less stressed and do not need to be upgraded as soon. If you take as a given that customers will want to watch NetFlix, then the costs of hosting these cache boxes is supposed to be offset by the reduced pressure on the long-distance Comcast network connections.
Of course Netflix bears some costs. They pay their ISP just like I pay mine.
A car analogy, eh? Alright then, try this one on for size:
Let's pretend the company in your analogy were Mitsubishi instead of Toyota. Mitsubishi is a huge conglomerate that makes bunches of different things; automobile manufacturing is only about 10% (by revenue) of what it does.
We'll continue to imagine that Mitsubishi Automotive is still doing all the nefarious things listed above -- being really, really pissed off at Mitsubishi Automotive would still be perfectly valid.
There's also a division of Mitsubishi that makes pharmaceuticals (Kyowa Kirin). Let's imagine for a moment that Kyowa Kirin does something really great -- maybe it makes revolutionary vaccines that cure all the worst diseases, and then distributes them worldwide for free, for example.
Would you also be justified in being pissed off at Kyowa Kirin for Mitsubishi Automotive's actions, even though Kyowa Kirin had no control over them and the work it was doing itself was valuable, just because they had the same corporate ownership? Of course not!
And condemning the FCC just because the US Marshals fucked up makes just as little sense.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
While it's true that "The various US federal government agencies are all filled with *people*, all different kinds of people." this doesn't mean that they are trustworthy. The FCC, in particular, has done some rather vile things to support "its constituents" (i.e., the money making groups it is supposed to regulate). And the current chairman is not particularly trustworthy, being closely associated with the MPAA.
OTOH, the FCC has less direct reason to abuse the general citizenry than do the large monopoly ISPs. So while I hardly trust them, I still trust them more than, say Verizon, or AT&T.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
So that's why we need a 300+ page law?
The code (law) is 8 pages. The remaining 290+ pages are legally mandated responses to comments and grievances filed during the public comment period.
It would be nice if we could see the text, but certain Republican commissioners are refusing to submit their own official comments of record. Until the time period for them to do so runs out, we don't get to see a word of it.
Snoopsnitch needs to be in the F-Droid repo if you want any real traction around it...
The problem with this argument is the law didnt stand still since its inception. It has been amended and ruled on to handle modern issues. your argument is not honest. Point out SPECIFIC archaic rules that you object to. Last i checked POTS works damn well and has for a century so you are going to need compelling evidence.
Good-bye
In a competitive ISP environment, the ISP's would be asking Netflix for option 3 to keep their customers happy.
Why should Comcast give Netflix free co-location services? It's not Comcast's responsibility to enable Netflix's business model. I have no lost love for Comcast, or Time Warner, or Verizon, it's just that I don't see Netflix as a White Knight here. They're throwing their weight around to try and get favorable treatment that is unavailable to would be upstarts. Frankly I think that's offensive to the spirit of what network neutrality is supposed to be about.
I do see some fundamental problems. One of them (conflict of interest, most ISPs are also in the video business) is discussed in the mainstream. The rest are far too nuanced for most people to understand. To pick one, as the internet has evolved there has been a blurring of the traditional line between end user internet service providers and providers of bulk IP transit services. ISPs like Comcast now run national data networks rival the Tier 1 providers in many respects. I don't think anybody anticipated this development, or the interface between large national ISPs and CDNs.
My fear here is twofold:
1. The FCC is attacking the wrong problems.
2. We're opening pandora's box and regulating something that has flourished without regulation.
I think it would be more beneficial for Uncle Sam to encourage competition in the ISP space than to regulate what ISPs can do. Do you think any of the killer apps we take for granted would have emerged in a highly regulated Ma Bell environment? Because those are some of the regulations that they're seeking to apply.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
POTS is dying, largely because it's unable to respond to more nimble competitors that do not have to deal with a legacy regulatory environment. It's arguably already a niche product, one that will be completely dead in another decade or two at most.
And, incidentally, the law in question hasn't been amended since 1996. When the 33.6kbit/s modem was bleeding edge for consumer internet access. Do you remember those days? Because I do. 19 years later and I have the equivalent of a T3 in my pocket, which works almost anywhere in CONUS. Such a connection was unthinkable for consumer access in 1996.
You'll pardon my skepticism if I think that advancement would have occurred that rapidly if we had sought to apply outdated regulations drafted for Ma Bell to the internet.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
The reason option 3 seems bonkers is that we are so far from a competitive environment that the ISP can do whatever he likes and keep his customers.
This is the 'fuckery' problem that John Oliver raised a ruckus with.
Hopefully, the FCC will both encourage a real competitive ISP environment with unbundling and muni broadband,
and make a virtual one with rules for peering that require an ISP to carry traffic the last hop to their customers.
Subject to fair, published last hop B/W management, of course.
Artificially limiting peering B/W to prevent needing to provide anywhere near the last hop service offered is not a fair way to treat customers.
This practice would not survive in a competitive market.
The original question is still interesting.
Do we expect the ability/motives of the FCC to do this without causing more harm than good?
That's the problem. The ISP that pushes more traffic usually pays the one that pushes less traffic in a settled interconnect. (If the traffic flow is the same in either direction, the ISPs agree to "settlement free peering" where neither side pays anything.) Netflix's ISP refused to pay Verizon, and then lied in the press about it. Netflix started making its own interconnect deals once they figured out what was going on, but they're still pushing for Title II because they want to go back to using cheap ISPs who can now demand settlement free peering.
That's normal for core networks where traffic is expected to be roughly equal in both directions and generally unsolicited (by the network). Comcast is neither; they won't _let_ me send as much as I receive (to be equal, I would have to essentially get nothing but email, and send quite a bit of email out), and everything I receive other than email is by my request. It's not anyone else's fault that Comcast traffic related to me isn't symmetric, it's theirs and mine. So if they need more money to handle the traffic that is on their network because of me, they should talk to me.
Hear hear. Why would someone concerned about cell network hanky-panky trust a closed-sourced app from the Google Play Store to detect it?
Ah, but how does the traffic get from Netflix's ISP to your ISP?
Hint: The actual internet is more than the oft-imagined cloud on network diagrams. Network operators agree to interconnect with each other, for mutual benefit, and if such an agreement is unbalanced (because one party is handing off more traffic than the amount they're willing or able to deliver) one of the network operators will end up paying the other.
A simplified version, wherein we're both network operators, Case 1, equal traffic flow:
Shakrai: "I have 3 terabit/s of peak hour traffic that you can deliver for me."
suutar: "Perfect. I also have 3 terabit/s of peak hour traffic that I can't deliver but you can. Let's connect our networks."
Shakrai: "Sounds good."
Case 2, unbalanced traffic flow:
Shakrai: "I have 10 terabit/s of peak hour traffic that you can deliver for me."
suutar: "I only have 3 terabit/s to hand off to you. We're going to bill you for the difference, okay?"
Shakrai: "Sure."
That has been the paradigm on the internet for a very long time, because it's recognized that it costs money to get a packet from Point A to Point B. Networks pay for connections to other networks unless they can absorb a roughly equal amount of traffic. You can't dump terabits of traffic into someone's network without offering them something in return.
Netflix wants to blow up this longstanding model because bearing the full cost of delivering their packets eats into their bottom line. It doesn't kill their business model, the fact that they're profitable attests to that, but it sure seems to keep Mr. Hastings up late at night. If you actually drill down into this issue you'll find that they've hijacked the concept of network neutrality. There a ton of arguments to be made in favor of network neutrality but Netflix is not one of them.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
You're also limited in its deployment and / or use by the following statement:
" To use SnoopSnitch, a rooted device with a Qualcomm chipset running stock Android 4.1 or higher is required. "
My ISP (comcast) is not, never has been, never will be, and never expected to be a symmetric netizen. I feel it entirely appropriate for them to come talk to me if traffic that is on their network because of me is a problem... which describes every netflix stream that ever hit my router.
In the long run it comes out the same either way; netflix bills me or comcast bills me. But I feel it's more honest of Comcast to just bill me directly instead of making netflix do it.
I don't trust big business or government. But, I trust that business is more interested in exploiting me for profit and government is more interested in exploiting me for power.
I don't see a lot of difference between the NSA and FCC, and in fact, I suspect the NSA is in favor of net neutrality so that their collection traffic doesn't get choked off by someone's ISP unless they tag it somehow so the ISPs all know who's data it is, which I'm sure the NSA would prefer not to advertise.
I agree with mi. There isn't a significant difference here between the FCC and the US Marshals. They have the same sort of people and the same leadership.
Put it this way, Obama can't fire Wheeler without just cause. He does not work "at the pleasure of the President".
Tell that to the Federal Attorneys that George W didn't like because they were daring to investigate Republicans, or the air traffic controllers that Reagan fired because they were daring to complain about their crappy working conditions.
Some of us have worked on the ISP side of the house (disclosure: I worked for a small one that was crushed by Time Warner a long time ago) and view the Netflix debacle in a different light. Netflix has a history of trying to pass their costs onto third parties, by abusing settlement free peering, pushing their "Open Connect" devices on ISPs without offering to pay the usual co-location expenses, or trying to cheap out on envelopes that wound up jamming in sorting machines and causing USPS all manner of difficulties. That one turned into a major spat as I recall, with USPS having to threaten to revoke their bulk mailing/pre-sort price discounts before Netflix was willing to back down.
The long standing model for internet traffic has been sender pays. If you're dumping more traffic into my network than you take off my hands you pay me to get it closer to its destination. If you're taking more off my hands than I'm taking from you then I pay you. In the final example, we exchange roughly equal amounts of traffic and agree to do so without remuneration.
Is that model still valid today? It's hard to say. It did build the internet as we know it today, for better or worse. It would be easier for me to be sympathetic if this wasn't a pissing contest between Netflix and ISPs. The arrogance of Netflix is truly astounding, from my perspective as someone who worked in the ISP business, and I see it as billionaires arguing with other billionaires about who should foot the bill for their respective business models.
I'm confused. Netflix dumps their traffic onto the interwebs through some sort of ISP (paying them for the privledge), don't they? And when that ISP interconnects with my ISP they do the "sender pays" sfuff you talk about. Then my ISP gets it to me. How is Netflix doing something wrong here? Was their ISP not paying their internconnection bills?
I thought what happened was that Comcast acting as my ISP realized that they could throttle the Netflix traffic and extort money out of Netflix beyond what Netflix's ISP was already paying them to carry the traffic. That seems unjust. As a customer of this ISP, shouldn't I be able to decide what data I want to access, without the providers of that data needing to pay extra fees to reach me?
With enough people using SnoopSnitch ( https://play.google.com/store/... ), which detects Stingray cell phone trackers, and a collection site on Facebook or any other social media site (Reddit sounds like a good candidate), the locations of these things could be mapped and published in jig time.
Except that they're mobile perhaps?
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
How is this even a question? OF COURSE the ISPs are left to pay for "new internet investment", that is a material cost of doing business. In order to reach a subscriber, I have to run a cable or build a tower, which requires some capital expenditure.
For a mature/operational ISP, capital is usually obtained by charging the subscribers a monthly fee. The monthly fee covers things like infrastructure and the operating expenses, maintenance and upgrades thereto, labour costs for the people to operate, maintain and upgrade the network, support, service fees for bandwidth and/or usage and allows (usually) an amount usually referred to as "profit".
We know from their published numbers that most ISPs are making fairly obscene profits (90% is commonly quoted, but break it down and it's not always quite that high), and many of them are more than happy to take from the USF BUT users are not really seeing much benefit - to the point where some states are bringing lawsuits against telcos (WV vs Frontier springs to mind right now). Profit and availability of capital therefore is not really an issue in this industry so the question becomes one of what makes the ISPs believe that they are seemingly exempt from having this cost center in their business model? What makes them think they can charge twice for what is essentially the same transaction?
Sure, it would be silly to expect a leased line on dedicated infrastructure at the prices paid for typical residential service BUT to the same end bandwidth itself really isn't that expensive. Consumers will find ways to use it and this leads to a continual upgrading process, there is no question, but again, part of the cost of doing business as a middleman is buying sufficient product from your suppliers to be able to distribute to your clientele. You get more clients, you need to buy more product to account for that. In any other industry, they would get sued for breach of contract for not having enough (or the wrong) product.
Many will argue that "Hey, $ISP built this network so it's theirs to do with what they wish" but the reality is that many networks were taxpayer funded and so it goes without saying that if something is taxpayer funded, it absolutely should NOT be "private property" - they may have the contract to build/maintain/upgrade it, for which they get paid, but the same goes if I have a contract to build/maintain/upgrade something for which I get paid... just because I built/maintained/upgraded something and got paid for it, doesn't make it mine: it remains the property of the entity which paid for it.
Perhaps a better analogy is building a house. Unless you pay for it in cash, you probably have a mortgage. Yes, it is yours in title but the bank still owns it, even if you built it with your own two hands. And if you don't maintain it, the city council might have something to say about it. And if you don't periodically upgrade it, you may no longer be in compliance with one or more regulations. And if you stop paying for it, soon enough it'll no longer be yours.
The private property issue though does murk up the argument in the two paragraphs above, but there is some fairly fundamental differences, namely that the infrastructure in question is rarely ON what could really be considered private property, by which I mean, cables may go across private back yards, up private driveways and across private fields, but houses are not linked up in a serial, with each house relying on the previous house to remain connected. The ISP infrastructure in your house is for your household (which you paid for with your install fee, but that's another thing altogether), and has no place in the supply of services to your neighbours or neighbourhood and as such unless there is a problem with *YOUR* service, a technician doesn't require specific permission from any one individual to physically access the ISP equipment that supplies an area.
Given this, it would seem that some of these US ISPs want to have their cake and eat it too: public funding for buildi
Founder & COO, Hayai India (hayai.in) / USA (hayaibroadband.com)