ISPs

Deep Packet Inspection and the Confluence of Privacy Regimes

/ Christopher Parsons / 12 Comments

insiderouterI learned today that I was successful in winning a Social Sciences and Human Research Council (SSHRC) award. (Edit September 2009: I’ve been upgraded to a Joseph Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship). Given how difficult I found it to find successful research statements (save for through personal contacts) I wanted to post my own statement for others to look at (as well as download if they so choose). Since writing the below statement, some of my thoughts on DPI have become more nuanced, and I’ll be interested in reflecting on how ethics might relate to surveillance/privacy practices. Comments and ideas are, of course, welcomed.

Interrogating Internet Service Provider Surveillance:
Deep Packet Inspection and the Confluence of International Privacy Regimes

Context and Research Question

Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are ideally situated to survey data traffic because all traffic to and from the Internet must pass through their networks. Using sophisticated data traffic monitoring technologies, these companies investigate and capture the content of unencrypted digital communications (e.g. MSN messages and e-mail). Despite their role as the digital era’s gatekeepers, very little work has been done in the social sciences to examine the relationship between the surveillance technologies that ISPs use to survey data flows and the regional privacy regulations that adjudicate permissible degrees of ISP surveillance. With my seven years of employment in the field of Information Technology (the last several in network operations), and my strong background in conceptions of privacy and their empirical realization from my master’s degree in philosophy and current doctoral work in political science, I am unusually well-suited suited to investigate this relationship. I will bring this background to bear when answering the following interlinked questions in my dissertation: What are the modes and conditions of ISP surveillance in the privacy regimes of Canada, the US, and European Union (EU)? Do common policy structures across these privacy regimes engender common realizations of ISP surveillance techniques and practices, or do regional privacy regulations pertaining to DPI technologies preclude any such harmonization?

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EU: Judicial Review Central to Telecom Disconnects

/ Christopher Parsons

elpalaciodejusticiaI’m perhaps a bit idealistic, but I think that there are clear contemporary demonstrations of democracy ‘working’. Today’s example comes to us from Europe, where the European Parliament has voted to restore a graduated response to copyright infringement that pertains to when and how individuals can be disconnected from the Internet. Disconnecting individuals from the ‘net, given its important role in citizens’ daily lives, can only be done with judicial oversight; copyright holders and ISPs alone cannot conspire to remove file sharers. This suggests that any three-strike policy in the EU will require judicial oversight, and threatens to radically reform how the copyright industry can influence ISPs.

What might this mean for North America? If policy learning occurs, will we see imports of an EU-style law on this matter? Do we want our policy actors to adopt an EU-model, which could be used to implement a three-strike rule that just includes judicial review at the third strike? In Canada, with the tariffs that we pay, there are already permissible conditions for file sharing – do we really want to see strong American or WIPO copyright legally enforced on our soil?

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Privacy Advocates and Deep Packet Inspection: Vendors, ISPs, and Third-Parties

/ Christopher Parsons / 11 Comments

sandvinetestnetwork[I recently posted a version of this on another website, and thought that it might be useful to re-post here for readers. For a background on Deep Packet Inspection technologies, I’d refer you to this.]

There is a very real need for various parties who advocate against Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) to really work through what Packet Inspection appliances have done, historically, so that their arguments against DPI are as precise as possible. Packet Inspection isn’t new, and it’s not likely to be going away any time soon – perimeter defences for networks are essential for mitigating spam and viruses (and rely on Medium Packet Inspection).

I’m in no way an expert in the various discussions surrounding DPI (though I try to follow the network neutrality, privacy, and communications infrastructure debates), but I have put together a paper that attempts to clarify the lineage of DPI devices and (briefly) suggest that DPI can be understood as a surveillance tool that is different from prior packet inspection technologies. From a privacy perspective (which is where I sit in relation to the deployment of DPI), it’s important for privacy advocates to understand that approaching the issue from a principle-based approach is fraught with problems at legal, theoretical, and practical levels. The complexities of developing a principle-based approach is one of the reasons why many contemporary privacy scholars (myself included) have opted for a ‘problem-based’ approach to identifying privacy infringements. What, exactly, do most advocates mean when they say that their privacy is ‘violated’? I don’t think that a clear position comes out in the advocate position (maybe it does, and I’m just not aware of it) – they appear to allude to a fundamental right to privacy, while pointing to specific instances as ‘violations’ of that right. The worry with principled approaches is that they are challenged to fully capture what we mean when we say something is private, and equally challenged to capture contextualized social norms of privacy (e.g. streetview in the US versus Japan, bodily privacy in differing cultures, etc etc).

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Deep Packet Inspection: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

/ Christopher Parsons

goodbaduglyIn this post, I want to try to lay out where I see some of the Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) discussions. This is to clarify things in my head that I’ve been thinking through for the past couple of days and to lay out for readers some of the ‘bigger picture’ elements of the DPI discussion (as I read them). If you’ve been fervently following developments surrounding this technology, then a lot of what is below is just rehashing what you know – hopefully the summary is useful – but if you’re relatively unfamiliar with what’s been going on this might help to orient what’s been, and is being, said.

Participants and Themes

The uses of DPI appliances are regularly under fire by network neutrality advocates, privacy advocates, and people who are generally concerned about communication infrastructure. DPI lets network operators ‘penetrate’ data packets that are routed through their networks and this practice is ‘new’, insofar as prior networking appliances were generally prevented from inspecting the actual payload, or content, of the data packets that are shuttled across the ‘net. To make this a bit clearer, when you send email it is broken into a host of little packets that are reassembled at the destination; earlier networking appliances could determine the destination, the kind of file being transmitted (e.g. a .mov or .jpeg), and so forth but they couldn’t accurately identify what content was in the packet (e.g. the characters of an email message held within a packet). Using DPI, network operators can now (in theory) configure their DPI appliances to capture the actions that users perform online and ‘see’ what they are doing in real time.

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Announcement: Working Paper on DPI Now Available

/ Christopher Parsons / 2 Comments

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Last year I spent some time and put together a working paper entitled, “Deep Packet Inspection in Perspective: Tracing its lineage and surveillance potentials,” for the New Transparency Project (of which I’m a student member). The document has gone live as of today – if you have any comments/thoughts concerning it feel free to send them my way! The abstract is below:

Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are responsible for transmitting and delivering their customers’ data requests, ranging from requests for data from websites, to that from file-sharing applications, to that from participants in Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) chat sessions. Using contemporary packet inspection and capture technologies, ISPs can investigate and record the content of unencrypted digital communications data packets. This paper explains the structure of these packets, and then proceeds to describe the packet inspection technologies that monitor their movement and extract information from the packets as they flow across ISP networks. After discussing the potency of contemporary packet inspection devices, in relation to their earlier packet inspection predecessors, and their potential uses in improving network operators’ network management systems, I argue that they should be identified as surveillance technologies that can potentially be incredibly invasive. Drawing on Canadian examples, I argue that Canadian ISPs are using DPI technologies to implicitly ‘teach’ their customers norms about what are ‘inappropriate’ data transfer programs, and the appropriate levels of ISP manipulation of consumer data traffic.

Thoughts: Irish Newest Victims in the Copyright Wars

/ Christopher Parsons

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Copyright is becoming an ever-increasingly important part of contemporary lexicon; in Canada, it’s so important that we now have a ‘citizen’s guide‘ to help ‘regular folk’ with their copyright-related concerns. While most eyes are presently focused on the Pirate Bay trial (Ernesto has been blogging about it regularly since the trial started, Jesse Brown’s recent podcast addresses it, etc.), a major ‘success’ in the war on copyright has actually been ‘won’ by Big Media. Ireland’s Eircom has announced that they will be blocking access to peer-to-peer websites in an effort to limit their users’ access to spaces holding copywritten content. This effort to block access is in addition to Eircom’s agreement that they will cut off users who are found infringing on copyright multiple times (a three-strikes rule).

This development substantially ratchets up the question, “What is role(s) do telecommunications companies play in today’s virtualized world, and global digital economy?” Self-imposed private corporations’ policies now threaten to substantially normalize ‘permissible’ modes of both accessing data and determining what accesses are ‘legitimate’ and which are not.

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