DPI

Publication: Is Your ISP Snooping On You?

/ Christopher Parsons / 3 Comments

Internet_TreeI’m happy to let my readers know that Marita Moll’s and Leslie Shade’s (eds.) The Internet Tree: The State of Telecom Policy in Canada 3.0 is now available for purchase. The book interrogates how Canada’s digital future does, and should, look in coming days by discussing present policies and proposing policies to enhance Canada’s position in the digitally connected world. The editors have done an excellent job in contacting academics, advocates, and solicitors from around Canada to develop an exciting and accessible edited collection on Internet and broadband in Canada. It includes scholars such as Dwayne Winseck, Michael Geist, Catherine Middleton, and Richard Smith, along with contributions from Steve Anderson (Open Media), Michael Janigan (PIAC), and a host of graduate students and researchers.

The book is published through the Canadian Center for Policy Alternatives (CCPA). The publisher and editors describe that book as a collection in which:

… committed public interest advocates and academics present primers on provocative digital policy issues: broadband access, copyright, net neutrality, privacy, and security, along with a consideration of structures of participation in policy-making and communication rights.

Contributors to The Internet Tree argue for a digital economy strategy that casts a winning vote for openness, broadband as an essential service, and community engagement and inclusion.

The Internet Tree is available for just $14.95 and is supportive of digital economy strategies that are guided by the principles of openness, broadband as an essential service, community engagement and inclusion, national sovereignty, and digital literacy programs. My own contribution (“Is Your ISP Snooping On You?”) explains the technical and social concerns raised by deep packet inspection to someone who doesn’t know a coaxial cable from a fibre node, with other authors similarly working to explain issues to the layman while offering suggestions to alleviate, mediate, or overcome the challenges facing Canada’s digital ecosystem. It’s got a great set of authors and I’d highly recommend it as a complement to Open Media’s recently published report on digital networks in Canada.

Released: Literature Review of Deep Packet Inspection

/ Christopher Parsons

Scholars and civil advocates will be meeting next month in Toronto at the Cyber-surveillance in Everyday Life workshop. Participants will critically interrogate the surveillance infrastructures pervading daily life as well as share experiences, challenges, and strategies meant to to rein in overzealous surveillance processes that damage public and private life. My contribution to the workshop comes in the form of a modest overview of literature examining Deep Packet Inspection. Below is an abstract, as well as a link to a .pdf version on the review.

Abstract

Deep packet inspection is a networking technology that facilitates intense scrutiny of data, in real-time, as key chokepoints on the Internet. Governments, civil rights activists, technologists, lawyers, and private business have all demonstrated interest in the technology, though they often disagree about what constitutes legitimate uses. This literature review takes up the most prominent scholarly analyses of the technology. Given Canada’s arguably leading role in regulating the technology, many of its regulator’s key documents and evidentiary articles are also included. The press has been heatedly interested in the technology, and so round out the literature review alongside civil rights advocates, technology vendors, and counsel analyses.

Downloadable .pdf version of the literature review.

Technology and Politics in Tunisia and Iran: Deep Packet Surveillance

/ Christopher Parsons
Middleeast-IranFor some time, I’ve been keeping an eye on how the Iranian government monitors, mediates, and influences data traffic on public networks. This has seen me write several posts, here and elsewhere, about the government’s usage of deep packet inspection, the implications of Iranian government surveillance, and the challenges posed by Iranian ISPs’ most recent network updates. Last month I was invited to give a talk at the Pacific Centre for Technology and Culture about the usage of deep packet inspection by the Iranian and Tunisian governments.

Abstract

Faced with growing unrest that is (at least in part) facilitated by digital communications, repressive nation-states have integrated powerful new surveillance systems into the depths of their nations’ communications infrastructures. In this presentation, Christopher Parsons first discusses the capabilities of a technology, deep packet inspection, which is used to survey, analyze, and modify communications in real-time. He then discusses the composition of the Iranian and Tunisian telecommunications infrastructure, outlining how deep packet inspection is used to monitor, block, and subvert encrypted and private communications. The presentation concludes with a brief reflection on how this same technology is deployed in the West, with a focus on how we might identify key actors, motivations, and drivers of the technology in our own network ecologies.

Note: For more information on the Iranian use of deep packet inspection, see ‘Is Iran Now Actually Using Deep Packet Inspection?‘

Deep Packet Inspection and Consumer Transparency

/ Christopher Parsons

Image by David Clow

Rogers Communications modified their packet inspection systems last year, and ever since customers have experienced degraded download speeds. It’s not that random users happen to be complaining about an (effectively) non-problem: Rogers’ own outreach staff has confirmed that the modifications took place and that these changes have negatively impacted peer to peer (P2P) and non-P2P applications alike. Since then, a Rogers Communications senior-vice president, Ken Englehart, has suggested that any problems customers have run into are resultant of P2P applications themselves; no mention is made of whether or how Rogers’ throttling systems have affected non-P2P traffic.

In this brief post, I want to quickly refresh readers on the changes that Rogers Communications made to their systems last year, and also note some of the problems that have subsequently arisen. Following this, I take up what Mr. Englehart recently stated in the media about Rogers’ throttling mechanisms. I conclude by noting that Rogers is likely in compliance with the CRTC’s transparency requirements (or at least soon will be), but that such requirements are ill suited to inform the typical consumer.

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Is Iran Now Actually Using Deep Packet Inspection?

/ Christopher Parsons / 4 Comments


Photo by Hamed Saber

I’ve previously written about whether the Iranian government uses deep packet inspection systems to monitor and mediate data content. As a refresher, the spectre of DPI was initially raised by the Wall Street Journal in a seriously flawed article several years ago. In addition to critiquing that article, last year I spent a while pulling together various data sources to outline the nature of the Iranian network infrastructure and likely modes of detecting dissident traffic.

Since January 2010, the Iranian government  may have significantly modified their network monitoring infrastructure. In short, the government seems to have moved from somewhat ham-fisted filtering systems (e.g. all encrypted traffic is throttled/blocked) to a granular system (where only certain applications’ encrypted traffic is blocked). In this post I’ll outline my past analyses of the Iranian Internet infrastructure and look at the new data on granular targeting of encrypted application traffic. I’ll conclude by raising some questions that need to be answered about the new surveillance system, and note potential dangers facing Iranian dissidents if DPI has actually been deployed.

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Agenda Denial and UK Privacy Advocacy

/ Christopher Parsons / 5 Comments

stopFunding, technical and political savvy, human resources, and time. These are just a few of the challenges standing before privacy advocates who want to make their case to the public, legislators, and regulators. When looking at the landscape there are regularly cases where advocates are more successful than expected or markedly less than anticipated; that advocates stopped BT from permanently deploying Phorm’s Webwise advertising system was impressive, whereas the failures to limit transfers of European airline passenger data to the US were somewhat surprising.[1] While there are regular analyses of how privacy advocates might get the issue of the day onto governmental agendas there is seemingly less time spent on how opponents resist advocates’ efforts. This post constitutes an early attempt to work through some of the politics of agenda-setting related to deep packet inspection and privacy for my dissertation project. Comments are welcome.

To be more specific, in this post I want to think about how items are kept off the agenda. Why are they kept off, who engages in the opposition(s), and what are some of the tactics employed? In responding to these questions I will significantly rely on theory from R. W. Cobb’s and M. H. Ross’ Cultural Strategies of Agenda Denial, linked with work by other prominent scholars and advocates. My goal is to evaluate whether the strategies that Cobb and Ross write about apply to the issues championed by privacy advocates in the UK who oppose the deployment of the Webwise advertising system. I won’t be working through the technical or political backstory of Phorm in this post and will be assuming that readers have at least a moderate familiarity with the backstory of Phorm – if you’re unfamiliar with it, I’d suggest a quick detour to the wikipedia page devoted to the company.

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