Yes, your ISP/IT Department is watching you

Welcome to 2006. This is nothing new. Wether such actions are more common nowadays and by who (ISP only or ISP for authorities) matters. There are no statistics provided by the writer of this article though. The writer does not even specify about which jurisdiction he’s talking about.

I am a EU civilian hence my post is mostly from that point of view however it contains also some general aspects which either apply worldwide or are aspects to consider for every person using the Internet no matter where that person resides.

A Good ISP does not log all your data though. First, for the simple reason that capturing data for every customer is not legal (privacy invasion), nor required, while it costs a lot of money to log. Second, EU law will soon demand header data is logged; this counts for every EU civilian. The latter is a privacy issue, but only contains headers. It is about who you have contact with, not what you discuss with them. In the case where e.g. you have contact with a dubious person, it may lead to a tap though since this means you are in their 1st tier of contacts. Wether such tap was justified or not will be seen afterwards. Authorities do not know such yet which is why -in this case- they decide to tap you in the first place.

Besides that, authorities may decide to tap your data. In such case either they or your ISP in collaboration with the police may tap all your data. If you use encryption on all your data while you have nothing to hide from them (except standard privacy which i don’t argue against) you make yourself more a suspect. Such potantially leads to additional actions. Hence it is the question wether such move is wise.

Paranoid for what exactly? Using SSH to log in on your server is normal since such is private data and since such contains an important password. However by using Tor or Freenet you MAY support someone who uses the service to look for terrorism, child pr0n or performs spam runs. Its the question wether you want to support such causes.

Its also the question how anonymous and secure a network such as an anonymizer really is. Often these cost money, and when authorities really are after you then they very well contact the pay-service to tap you or to get your private data. And yes, such services can also easily be tapped using backdoors on the end service where the data is decrypted. I remember two cases on this: one where the BKA (German secret service) trojaned the anonymizer service JAP a Java frontend to an anonymizing proxy. The other one involved a well known US-based anonymizer service who cooperated with the FBI.

I’m aware some ISPs for example throttle/filter P2P networks such as BitTorrent. This does not mean they log or cache your data. It merely means they detect and throttle/filter the protocol which is simple using a Layer-7 bandwidth throttler or firewall. In such case, it may be wise to use encryption to circumvent the throttling/firewalling.

If you are a political activist, lawyer or otherwise public person in the lights it may be wise to use services like this. The same counts for when you are after dubious things such as terrorism, child pr0n or spam. Wether it works is a different question. Most people who read this message are not into anything like this. My point is this: if you are a normal person just worried about your privacy then just protecting all your data by encryption and anonymizing is not necessarily useful or helpful for your cause. Especially not when the service you use is used by dubious personae and/or when you facilitate such personae by running such service which is the case with Tor and Freenet. Both are also pretty slow and eat bandwidth for breakfast.

I myself have been political semi active and to show authorities i am not anymore i do not use encryption except SSH for remote servers. This proofs to them i have nothing to hide while they can read that i am not a danger to the state. Using excessive cryptography would damage my cause since it’d make them feel less secure about my activities.

So all i am saying is don’t just think you have to use something like this because someone writes about it such as here in this case. It is a hard decision to make and it involves many factors to consider. Do not blindly just run software like this.

Greets
– J.

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