Posted on 01/29/2008 5:56:29 PM PST by Clintonfatigued
Well then, I bope so too!
It can also be used as a way to secure exclusive content deals.
Excellent point.
I bope my beeber wont get stuned. I’m series.
Firstly, the email scanning is already happening, but not by the ISP. The investigative branches have strategically located taps on backbones now and have had for many years. Same with voice communication backbones.
I challenge you all to do your own investigation. You can start here:
http://home.hiwaay.net/~pspoole/echelon.html
Secondly, interception and monitoring can be done with little performance degradation, unlike 10 years ago. Backbone systems can replicate all traffic and mirror it to a monitoring port used by the monitoring system. As the monitoring system identifies traffic of interest, it dynamically creates access lists to block, throttle or drop traffic matching those parameters. This is a lower layer monitoring example. Using the same physical methods, the same thing could be done to filter content where the monitoring system actually disassembles packets and analyzes the payload for interesting data, and responds with whatever preset reaction the governing people decide such as forwarding and storing email, replacing or deleting data in the payload, redirecting the traffic, or whatever they wish.
My point is, you have been tapped for years already... all of us have. The real trick to this is to not worry about it and have faith that you are really not THAT interesting.
Now on to the business side of this...
AT&T would have many reasons for doing this including those listed above. Additionally, think about it this way... I use vonage for phone service. AT&T doesn’t want me to, they want me to use their phone service. Using the methods above, could they not make the quality of my vonage service suffer? Yes they can. I would be using their backbone to buy from their competitors.They could ultimately force me to either buy their phone service, or pay them an extra amount to make sure my vonage service works the way it is supposed to. They can prioritize my phone calls, or put them at the bottom of the list of important traffic, making my phone service suck. THIS is the most dangerous facet of this entire concept in my humble opinion. Just like I don’t go steal cars and rob banks, I don’t setup illegal file sharing stuff on my pc. I don’t want to go to jail or get sued. That doesn’t make privacy a non-issue with me, I really don’t want AT&T looking at anything I am doing, but at least I know I’m not going to jail because I control my behavior. This method of filtering can be abused on so many levels, it is absurd to think the consumer will accept it without revolt.
I just hope the courts see it our way as well.
Makes sense.
The record companies will sue AT&T for aiding and abeting IP theft.
no, they already have immunity and the cases to give them that.
this is just an excuse to creat a “pay for flow” marketing.
the copyright thing is BS.
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