AT&T and Other I.S.P.’s May Be Getting Ready to Filter

By Brad Stone

Tags: at and t, CES, content filtering, Copyright, digital fingerprinting, NBC, piracy
International Consumer Electronics Show

For the last 15 years, Internet service providers have acted - to use an old cliche - as wide-open information super-highways, letting data flow uninterrupted and unimpeded between users and the Internet.

But 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 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.

“What we are already doing to address piracy hasn’t been working. There’s no secret there,” said James Cicconi, senior vice president, external & legal affairs for AT&T.

Mr. Cicconi said that AT&T has been talking to technology companies, and members of the M.P.A.A. and R.I.A.A., for the last six months about carrying out digital fingerprinting techniques on the network level.

“We are very interested in a technology based solution and we think a network-based solution is the optimal way to approach this,” he said. “We recognize we are not there yet but there are a lot of promising technologies. But we are having an open discussion with a number of content companies, including NBC Universal, to try to explore various technologies that are out there.”

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.”

I asked the panelists how they would respond to objections from their customers over network level filtering – for example, the kind of angry outcry Comcast saw last year, when it was accused of clamping down on BitTorrent traffic on its network.

“Whatever we do has to pass muster with consumers and with policy standards. There is going to be a spotlight on it,” said Mr. Cicconi of AT&T.

After the session, he told me that I.S.P.’s like AT&T would have to handle such network filtering delicately, and do more than just stop an upload dead in its tracks, or send a legalistic cease and desist form letter to a customer. “We’ve got to figure out a friendly way to do it, there’s no doubt about it,” he said.

Microsoft Wants to Be Your Big Brother
By Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols
2008-01-18

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It's not science-fiction. It's a real technology and it cannot be allowed to happen or privacy will vanish.

Today, I have a temperature of 99 degrees Fahrenheit, a headache, my blood pressure is 100 over 71, and my heart-heat is around 90 beats per minute. I have felt better. Now, if Microsoft's plan goes the way it wants, my Windows computer will soon be reporting all of that, and more, to my boss.

This isn't science fiction. This isn't a remake of George Orwell's "1984." This is the future, according to a recently filed Microsoft patent. Let's call the product that might come from this patent Windows You. It is, as you'll see, an apt name.

In Microsoft's vision of tomorrow's office, according to a report in the London Times, our computers will be constantly monitoring us with wireless sensors. There's nothing new about Big Brother software. Programs that measure how many keystrokes we make per minute are old hat. If you work in an office and think for one moment that your e-mail, instant messaging or Web-browsing habits are in some way secret, you're a fool.

But, in Microsoft's new world, Windows You will not only be measuring medical biometrics, it will also be monitoring your metabolism. Are you logy after a big lunch? Windows You will be letting your boss know. Overweight? Had a drink at lunch? Falling asleep at the keyboard? Gotcha, gotcha and gotcha.

There's more. Let's say you're upset, and you've got an angry look on your face, Windows You will be reporting on that too. Did you start feeling angry when you read the e-mail that your co-worker was promoted? Big brother Microsoft and your manager will know that too.

What? You say that's not why you were angry? Are you sure? Because Windows You will also be measuring your galvanic skin response. What do you get when you put galvanic skin measurements with blood pressure readings? You get a lie detector.

And you thought drug tests to get a job was a bad idea.

Microsoft's patent application suggests that all this information will only be used so that management will be better able to help you in your job. Right. If you believe that you'll also believe that you had to burn down the village to save it.

This is the most breathtaking business invasion of privacy that I have ever seen seriously suggested. With this system, nothing, and I mean nothing, about your life will remain private.

No, I'm not being over-dramatic. Take all the information about you that's already available from corporate communications monitoring, cross-reference it in a SQL Server database with the biometric information from Windows You, and a sufficiently nosy boss can tell how you feel about your husband or wife, about how well, or not, you're doing with quitting smoking, and, last but never least, how you feel about your job.

Never mind whether you're doing a good job. If the boss decides that your attitude is wrong -- "The machines don't lie," he or she will say -- and out on the street you'll go, where your next would-be employer might want to look at your Windows You records to see if you're healthy enough to do your office job.

Of course, if the government, under the Patriot Act of 2011, got this information, life as we know it, is over. "Tell me Mr. Bradbury, you seemed 'happy' on June 12th just after the news of the Amtrak terrorist bombing arrived on your desktop news feed. Do you really expect us to believe that it was because June had agreed to marry you the night before? What are you hiding?"

We like to talk about the long, slippery slope of losing rights, of losing our privacy. This technology isn't a slope. It's a sheer drop to the world of Big Brother. It cannot, it must not, be allowed to be used in any business.

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Security/Microsoft-wants-to-your-Big-Brother/