Big Brother AT&T
p2pnet news | Freedom:- Is the Net closing, figuratively and literally?
"I.S.P.’s may be about to embrace a new metaphor: traffic cop.
"At a small panel discussion about digital piracy at NBC’s booth on the Consumer Electronics Show floor, representatives from NBC, Microsoft, several digital filtering companies and the telecom giant AT&T said discussed whether the time was right to start filtering for copyrighted content at the network level.
"Such filtering for pirated material already occurs on sites like YouTube and Microsoft’s Soapbox, and on some university networks.
"Network-level filtering means your Internet service provider – Comcast, AT&T, EarthLink, or whoever you send that monthly check to – could soon start sniffing your digital packets, looking for material that infringes on someone’s copyright."
And:
"What we are already doing to address piracy hasn’t been working. There’s no secret there," from James Cicconi, senior vice president, external & legal affairs for AT&T.
The quotes are clipped from a New York Times story.
Has AT&T gone crazy?
"The prospect of AT&T, already accused of spying on our telephone calls, now scanning every e-mail and download for outlawed content is way too totalitarian for my tastes," says Tim Wu in Slate, going on:
"But the bizarre twist is that the proposal is such a bad idea that it would be not just a disservice to the public but probably a disaster for AT&T itself.
"If I were a shareholder, I’d want to know one thing: Has AT&T, after 122 years in business, simply lost its mind?
"No one knows exactly what AT&T is proposing to build. But if the company means what it says, we’re looking at the beginnings of a private police state.
"That may sound like hyperbole, but what else do you call a system designed to monitor millions of people’s Internet consumption?"
Wanna buy a bridge?
US Big Brother looms online, was the head to p2pnet post yesterday.
A day earlier, "US wants access to everything online," we said, going on, "If you’re worried about online privacy, try this on for size. US intelligence agencies may soon have access to any and all emails, file transfers or web searches."
Both stories refer to National Intelligence director Mike McConnell’s plans to turn the Net into a nothing-is-sacred, no-holds-barred, free-trawl zone for US government intelligence agencies.
"If you think this effort is to track down a dead and buried al-Qaeda leader and his motley crew of cave-dwelling Muslims, I have a bridge to sell you in the Sonoran Desert," says Kurt Nimmo in the post.
"It was designed and deployed to keep tabs on you, so if you don’t want to be inserted in the government’s terrorist database, you best stay away from the We Are Change website, Infowars, and the site where you are now reading this, to name but three. Chances are you’re in calmer, safer, and less shark infested waters surfing porno websites."
‘Gant flood of complaints and termination-of-service notices’
Back to AT&T, whose corporation would, of course be absolutely essential for any data trawling scheme, the puzzle is how it thinks its proposal, "is anything other than corporate seppuku.," says WU, continuing:
"First, should these proposals be adopted, my heart goes out to AT&T’s customer relations staff. Exactly what counts as copyright infringement can be a tough question for a Supreme Court justice, let alone whatever program AT&T writes to detect copyright infringement. Inevitably, AT&T will block legitimate materials (say, home videos it mistakes for Hollywood) and let some piracy through. Its filters will also inescapably degrade network performance. The filter AT&T will really need will be the one that blocks the giant flood of complaints and termination-of-service notices coming its way."
But, he continues, "Here’s the kicker: To maintain that immunity, AT&T must transmit data ‘without selection of the material by the service provider’ and ‘without modification of its content.’
Once AT&T gets in the business of picking and choosing what content travels over its network, while the law is not entirely clear, it runs a serious risk of losing its all-important immunity. An Internet provider voluntarily giving up copyright immunity is like an astronaut on the moon taking off his space suit.
As the world’s largest gatekeeper, AT&T would immediately become the world’s largest target for copyright infringement lawsuits.
Adds Wu:
"I just don’t get the business aspect, so perhaps the only explanation that makes any sense is a political one. It may be that AT&T so hates being under the current network neutrality mandate that it sees fighting piracy as a way to begin treating some content differently than others – discriminating – in a politically acceptable way. Or maybe AT&T thinks its new friends in the content industry will let them into Hollywood parties if they help fight piracy. Whatever the explanation, AT&T is choosing a scary, expensive, and risky way to make a point. It is also, so far, alone on this one among Internet service providers; the cable industry is probably licking its chops in anticipation of new customers. That’s why if this plan goes any further, and I were an AT&T shareholder, I’d have just one thought: SELL."
Says the New York Times:
"Internet civil rights organizations oppose network-level filtering, arguing that it amounts to Big Brother monitoring of free speech, and that such filtering could block the use of material that may fall under fair-use legal provisions – uses like parody, which enrich our culture.
"Rick Cotton, the general counsel of NBC Universal, who has led the company’s fights against companies like YouTube for the last three years, clearly doesn’t have much tolerance for that line of thinking.
" ‘The volume of peer-to-peer traffic online, dominated by copyrighted materials, is overwhelming. That clearly should not be an acceptable, continuing status,’ he said. ‘The question is how we collectively collaborate to address this’."
Also See:-
New York Times – AT&T and Other I.S.P.’s May Be Getting Ready to Filter, January 8, 2008
Slate – Has AT&T Lost Its Mind?, January 16, 2008
p2pnet – US Big Brother looms online, January 16, 2008
try this on – US wants access to everything online, January 15, 2008
Use free p2pnet newsfeeds for your site. It’s really easy!
Subscribe to p2pnet.net | | rss feed: http://p2pnet.net/p2p.rss | | Mobile – http://p2pnet.net/index-wml.php
Net access blocked by government restrictions? Use Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto. Go here for details. Download here.
January 17th, 2008 at 11:39 am
Well! Buy Buy Ip wired private providers!
Welcome Anonymous Wifi Open P2P Networks! They are asking for it!
January 17th, 2008 at 12:31 pm
I have been thinking of this for a while now… create a wifi system of my own using my wireless router… everyone go to the 802.11 frequency now. What if we all began surfing using our wireless routers – sure we would have to get better distance from them but couldnt we create our own web doing something like this? If everyone who owns a router would unplug thier internet and begin searching for other wireless routers couldnt something come from it? It is hard to explain what I am thinking by writing it down… but i believe it isnt that far off from happening
January 17th, 2008 at 3:32 pm
This will eventually be challenged in court.Watch and see.
January 17th, 2008 at 4:40 pm
JD2 has the right idea. What he’s really talking about it a wireless mesh network. The problem happens when you have someone plugged into the wired internet backbone. Someone has to serve backhaul, unless you’re all just trading files and information among yourselves. Once someone taps into the “regular” internet, you may as well be on AT&T’s network. Practically all international backhaul is through AT&T. If you send a packet across the “regular” internet, it will hit one of AT&T’s servers, eventually, and be sucked into the surveillance node.
What many folks fail to understand is that AT&T is already pulling down this information. Right now, the intel agencies don’t have the right to use it, except against so called “enemies of the state”. Right now, the Intelligence Czar wants to push for laws which make us all enemies.
I think AT&T is airing this concept of filtering out because it wants money from the record companies. No way are subscribers going to pay to be monitored. Most will leave in droves when that happens, so the revenue for this type of thing won’t be coming from AT&T customers. That leaves music co., movie co., and the state. Someone has to pay for this uptick in surveillance. Just collecting the data is not enough. There must be people or programs available which will sift through the data, looking for patterns of copyright infringement.
Also, the whole copyright infringement thing is a red herring. Really, what AT&T and the gov. are doing is creating the surveillance state. They’re using the “fear” of lost Hollywood profits to drive the policy. This is the Stasi and SAVAK all over again, with fewer “disappearances” (although there have been a few of those, as well).
The file sharers will hit back with encrypted torrents. In fact, encryption may become so ubiquitous that everybody is using it (hey, why should my legitimate traffic be subject to inspection if my neighbor’s torrents pass right through?) This policy will have the effect of making everybody into a criminal. Basically, they’ll just assume that because you use encryption, you are probably guilty of something. The government will have accomplished its goal of being able to arrest anyone, at any time, for hidden or arbitrary reasons.
Fascists 1, Everybody Else 0
January 18th, 2008 at 12:32 am
Someone else on another site brought up a couple of good points;
1. AT&T will be filtering for content from the big media corporations, but what about copyrighted content from the “little guy”? If I write a song and it starts being traded on the P2P networks, will AT&T help me filter that song? If not, then basically they’re saying that it’s only important to filter the content from organizations with deep pockets.
2. If everyone starts encrypting all their online activities, how happy is the government going to be that they have to spend huge amounts of time and effort (if it’s even possible) to break the encryption on every piece of data that they pull down?
January 18th, 2008 at 7:25 am
If this lame brained, half assed measure is implemented by AT&T, this is my prediction.
First someone in the general public will create a (or several) copyrighted works and distributes them over the internet. Eventually, one will end up being somewhere on AT&T’s network that the copyright owner didn’t authorize and that person will ignore the little guy (see website owner or p2p user) and sue AT&T for not stopping it. This will be repeated until AT&T (or their stock holders) decides maybe giving up that immunity wasn’t worth it.
I may even volunteer to start the process(maybe).
January 18th, 2008 at 9:10 am
What I have been doing for some time and I would recommend anyone else do is:
1. Force encryption both in and out.
2. Use one of the gaming ports. Will really piss off the gamers
(there are more of them than bittorrent users) when thier online
games stop communicating after ISP’s start blocking port traffic.
3. Use IP blocklists. PeerGuardian for Windows. Azureus for Linux
allows you to use several different types besides the one for PG
all with auto updating.
If your bittorrent software doesn’t allow encryption change to another one. If yours does have encryption and you don’t have it turned on better turn it on.
January 18th, 2008 at 9:33 am
By Mahound, it’s AT&T’s company/product/service. What can you do if they do this but stop using their service?
January 18th, 2008 at 3:20 pm
2. If everyone starts encrypting all their online activities, how happy is the government going to be that they have to spend huge amounts of time and effort (if it’s even possible) to break the encryption on every piece of data that they pull down? quote from Rekrul
well said…… we will just get better encryption and and passkeys only when download complete …