"the ability of the government to go back to taps collected years earlier to look for material with which to influence potential witnesses in the present"

[rysiek]

Dnia poniedziałek, 20 stycznia 2014 20:51:34 Philip Shaw pisze:
> On 20 Jan 2014, at 19:52 , rysiek <rysiek at hackerspace.pl> wrote:
> > Corp? Are you implying that corporations are on "our" side of this? That's
> > cute.
> > 
> > Once corporations get 1. plausible deniability; 2. legal indemnification,
> > they'll be happy to provide any and all data to any government that asks.
> > I
> > hope we're all clear on that.
> 
> That varies from corp to corp - pure ISPs (as opposed to companies which are
> also involved in other areas of the media business), for example, are
> generally quite strongly opposed to filtering, wiretap and data retention
> laws, because they are a significant cost to them which makes their core
> product no better for their customers (and will often make things worse),
> without any useful benefit to them. Sure, they are only really interested
> in their own advantage, but their advantage coincides with the desires of
> privacy advocates, so an alliance of convenience is suitable.

Exactly. I am seeing this in Poland right now. We're after 3-4 different 
Internet censorship debates (and a few data retention ones), and ISPs had 
always been vehemently opposed. However, as soon as such a discussion 
gravitates towards tax incentives, direct payment, etc. -- they are all for 
it. They see it as an additional revenue stream.

In fact, a few international ISPs that operate in Poland (I will not disclose 
any of the two related colours) are -- as far as I know -- in the process of 
implementing parental filtering on the national network level. The tech is 
advanced and less costly than 5 years ago, and now ISPs seem to think that 
this will be a billable feature for parents.

Always about the children, eh?

My point being: we can't rely on corporations. We can use the momentary 
alliances as they form, but should not rely on them in the long run.

> OTOH, in the US many ISPs are also either content producers, TV companies,
> or POTS companies, and so have a strong interest in preventing their
> internet activities from harming those (often more profitable) areas of
> their business. Because they are themselves often beneficiaries of attempts
> to preserve traditional distribution channels and business methods, they
> are strong advocates for anti-privacy measures which they believe (rightly
> or wrongly) will help them while shifting any opposition onto the
> politicians.
> 
> Also, some companies have the sense to realise that even if handing over
> customer data is no great burden now, the demands from governments only
> tend to grow, and so opposing a small amount of snooping can protect
> themselves against a larger imposition later. (For example, the telephone
> companies at first only had to turn over data they were keeping anyway,
> then they were ordered to keep it at their own expense for government use.)

Yeah, but the lawmakers can make the best interest of corporations perfectly 
aligned with snooping and retention easily -- with law and money. The only 
place where we can really stop such activities is values/virtues/human rights. 
And these are foreign and all french to both corporations and politicians.

-- 
Pozdr
rysiek
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