Surveillance

Virgin Media to Monitor Copyright Infringement

/ Christopher Parsons / 6 Comments

truthliesandbroadbandLate last week The Register reported that Virgin Media is going to be trialling Detica’s Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) appliances to measure the levels of copyright-infringing file sharing that is occurring along Virgin Media’s networks. It’s important to note a few things right up front:

  1. I have a request in to the company manufacturing these appliances, Detica, and have been promised responses to my questions. In light of this, I’m not accusing Detica or Virgin Media of engaging in any ‘privacy invasive’ uses of DPI, at least not at the moment.
  2. The information that I’ll drawing on is, largely, from a consultation paper that Detica presented in late September of 2009.
  3. This post is largely meant as a ‘let’s calm down, and wait to hear about the technology’s details’ before suggesting that a massive campaign be mounted against what might be a relatively innocuous surveillance technology.

With that stated…

Detica describes themselves as a “business and technology consultancy specialising in helping clients collect, manage and exploit information to reveal actionable intelligence. As the digital revolution causes massive amounts of data to converge with a new generation of threats, many of our clients see this as one of their greatest challenges.” Their CView DPI system is meant to let ISPs better identify the amount of copyright infringing work that is coursing across their networks, in an effort to give ISPs better metrics as well as to determine whether arrangements between ISPs and content providers has a significant, measurable effect on the transfer of copyright infringing files.

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Tracing the Network, Tracing the NSA

/ Christopher Parsons / 2 Comments

NSA EagleIn many ways, I can credit the NSA along with the excellent reporting of Nate Anderson for why I’m so interested in surveillance technologies. In particular, when the story broke in 2005 that the NSA was likely engaged in massive wiretaps of domestic and international data traffic I was drawn to the power and capacity for the ‘net to be used for truly broad-based surveillance efforts. This interest was heightened when Nate published the first of a set of articles on deep packet inspection (DPI) for Ars Technica. Without these two key moments, along perhaps with some interesting reporting on copyright, I’d probably still be thinking through the conditions of ontological psychology through a Heideggerian or Hegellian lens.

Given that I am engaged in research into surveillance technologies, and have the absolute pleasure to be associated with truly excellent scholars, activists, advocates, collaborators, and friends who share similar research interests, I wanted to take a moment to ask you, my readers, to help us map data traffic. As you may be aware, the NSA is reputed to have installed systems in various networking hubs that lets them examine massive amounts of data traffic. It’s not entirely known how they inspect this traffic, or the algorithms that are used to parse the fire hose of data they must be inundated by, but researchers at the University of Toronto have a decent idea of what ‘carrier hotels’, or major Internet exchange/collocation points, have likely been compromised by NSA surveillance instruments.

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Rendering CCTV (Somewhat) More Transparent

/ Christopher Parsons

CCTV meets consumerismIn a conversation with Prof. Andrew Clement this summer we got talking about the ever-increasing deployment of CCTV cameras throughout Canada. The conversation was, at least in part, motivated by the massive number of cameras that are being deployed throughout Vancouver with the leadup to the 2010 Olympic games; these cameras were one of the key focuses of the 10th Annual Security and Privacy Conference, where the BC Privacy Commissioner said that he might resign if the surveillance infrastructure is not taken down following the games.

I don’t want to delve into what, in particular, Prof. Clement is thinking of doing surrounding CCTV given that I don’t think he’s publicly announced his intentions. What I will do, however, is outline my own two-pronged approach to rendering CCTV a little more transparent. At the onset, I’ll note that:

  1. My method will rely on technology (augmented reality) that is presently only in the hands of a small minority of the population;
  2. My method is meant to be more and more useful as the years continue (and as the technology becomes increasingly accessible to consumers).

The broad goal is the following: develop a set of norms and processes to categorize different CCTV installations. Having accomplished this task, a framework would be developed for an augmented reality program (here’s a great blog on AR) that could ‘label’ where CCTV installations are and ‘grade’ them based on the already established norms and processes.

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Thinking About a ‘Privacy Commons’

/ Christopher Parsons / 7 Comments

unclesamsurveillanceIn some privacy circles there is a vision of creating a simple method of decoding privacy policies. As it stands, privacy policies ‘exist’ in a nebulous domain of legalese. Few people read these policies, and fewer still understand what they do (and do not) say. The same has traditionally been true of many copyright agreements. To assuage this issue surrounding copyright, the creative commons were created. Privacy groups are hoping to take some of the lessons from the creative commons and apply it to privacy policies.

I need to stress that this is a ‘thinking’ piece – I’ve been bothered by some of the models and diagrams used to express the ‘privacy commons’ because I think that while they’re great academic pieces, they’re nigh useless for the public at large. When I use the term ‘public at large’ and ‘useless’ what I am driving at is this: the creative commons is so good because it put together a VERY simple system that lets people quickly understand what copyright is being asserted over particular works. A privacy commons will live (or, very possibly, die) on its ease of access and use.

So, let’s think about use-value of any mode of description. The key issue with many commons approaches is that they are trying to do way too much all at once. Is there necessarily a need for a uniform commons statement, or is privacy sufficiently complicated that we adopt a medical privacy commons, a banking privacy commons, a social networking privacy commons, and so forth? Perhaps, instead of cutting the privacy cake so granularly (i.e. by market segment) we should try to boil down key principles and then offer real-language explanations for each principle’s application in particular business environments instead. This division of the commons is a topic that researchers appreciate and struggle with.

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Copyright and the Blank Media Levy

/ Christopher Parsons

mediaplayer2I’ve been watching with some interest the new Artist 2 Fan 2 Artist project, recently started up by Jon Newton and Billy Bragg. The intent of the site is to bring artists and fans together and encourage these parties to speak directly with one another, without needing to pass through intermediaries such as producers, labels, public relations groups, managers, and so on. It will be interesting to see how the dialogue develops.

One of the key elements of the site that interest me the discussion of paying artists (and other content creators); how can we avoid demonizing P2P users while at the same time allocating funds to artists/copyright owners in a responsible manner. On October 5th, this topic was broached under the posting ‘In Favour of a Music Tax‘, and I wanted to bring some of my own comments surrounding the idea of a music tax to the forefront of my own writing space, and the audience here.

I think that an ISP-focused levy system is inappropriate for several reasons: it puts too much authority and control over content analysis than carriers need, puts carriers at risk when they misidentify content, and would make carriers (for-profit content delivery corporations) in charge of monitoring content without demanding consumers that pay ‘full value’ for content moving through their networks. This last point indicates that an ISP-based levy puts ISPs in a conflict of interest (at least in the case of the dominant ISPs in Canada). Another solution is required.

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Draft: What’s Driving Deep Packet Inspection in Canada?

/ Christopher Parsons

routingpacketsFor the past few weeks I’ve been working away on a paper that tries to bring together some of the CRTC filings that I’ve been reading for the past few months. This is a slightly revised and updated version of a paper that I presented to the Infoscape research lab recently. Many thanks to Fenwick Mckelvey for taking the lead to organize that, and also to Mark Goldberg for inviting me to the Canadian Telecom Summit, where I gained an appreciation for some of the issues and discussions that Canadian ISPs are presently engaged in.

Abstract:

Canadian ISPs are developing contemporary netscapes of power. Such developments are evidenced by ISPs categorizing, and discriminating against, particular uses of the Internet. Simultaneously, ISPs are disempowering citizens by refusing to disclose the technical information needed to meaningfully contribute to network-topology and packet discrimination discussions. Such power relationships become stridently manifest when observing Canadian public and regulatory discourse about a relatively new form of network management technology, deep packet inspection. Given the development of these netscapes, and Canadian ISPs’ general unwillingness to transparently disclose the technologies used to manage their networks, privacy advocates concerned about deep packet networking appliances abilities to discriminate between data traffic should lean towards adopting a ‘fundamentalist’, rather than a ‘pragmatic’, attitude concerning these appliances. Such a position will help privacy advocates resist the temptation of falling prey to case-by-case analyses that threaten to obfuscate these device’s full (and secretive) potentialities.

Full paper available for download here. Comments are welcome; either leave them here on the blog, or fire something to the email address listed on the first page of the paper.