Mark,
Thanks for your reply. It is good, at last, to have some facts rather than the assertions and guesswork that plagued this thread early on. On 4 April, I asked how do the Ellacoyas work. I pointed out that the Ellacoya site is bland, to the extent of containing no information. I asked if someone could write a short guide.
James_H, a forum moderator, and not a PlusNet employee, tried to cover some of the background on 5 April, and pointed out an interesting Ars Technica article. All four parts of that article make some quite interesting reading about the technical possibilities of these machines, none of it reassuring. It also led on to a Deep Packet Inspection White Paper which again made "interesting" reading.
After that, there has been little further factual input from the PlusNet side, and the whole thing went quiet on 7 April apart from a couple of posts by myself to bump the topic up a bit. And clearly PlusNet were content to see the topic die unresolved. Given the great "Phuss about Phorm", PlusNet's silence only adds to my disquiet.
On 15 May suddenly PlusNet wanted to say something. I am glad that someone in PlusNet Towers reads the comments on articles in The Register, such as [
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/05/14/bell_canada_throttling_and_privacy/], and that facts are now forthcoming. But as Kelly said: it is "down to whether he trusts our responses on it". That was probably said after having read my ticket on the topic which included a CSC Analyst telling me that "I'm sorry but we cannot discuss the legality of this in any way."
Why should I not trust the information yet?
- Initial refusal to (or at least failure to) discuss
- PlusNet's owners (BT) being proven liars on a very similar topic (Phorm trials)
- Ars Technica spelling out the technical capability of the kit
- Claims that the kit is overspecified (level 7 DPI) wrt the use to which it is said to be put
Add to that a general distrust of the surveillance society that the UK has indeed sleepwalked into, with such excitement as
- Forthcoming mandatory record keeping of all emails and web visits
- The increasingly politicised actions of enforcement bodies
- "Voluntary" checks of all (port 80 at present) activity against the IWF Block List, to which PlusNet may or may not have access, depending on which reply one reads
On that last point, I agree with the actions over kiddie porn, except that it abuses the 404 message, and should instead say "access denied" or something similar. And given the secrecy surrounding the method of generation of the list, I do not trust the government to insert other sites for banning in a few years time. Without public scrutiny, it has the potential to match the Great Firewall of China. Function creep is not unknown, eg the DNA database. The IWF is a government creature. By doing it "voluntarily" the ISPs saved the government from having to force the issue with legislation, and thereby they make any challenge regarding function creep less likely to succeed.
Against this background, simple bland assurances at the depth of "I am an ISP, trust me" won't do. Your note about the traffic signature just being a hex string could be the whole story, or it could be as disingenuous as the claim that automated fingerprint machines do not store fingerprint images. That is in fact the case, but what they do store is the minutiae that are used to check against the recorded print on file.
My initial worry was that the Ellacoya starts from the premise that the port number, or other packet header descriptor is a lie, and it must have some further proof that the traffic is what it purports to be, so that it can be correctly regulated or discarded. Then reading that Ellacoya machines are CALEA compliant really started the alarm bells ringing.
In the past, we could trust information on postcards, because the postman was probably too busy to read many of them, and anyway how many people did he know who would be interested in what he had read. These days of course, the techniques of electronic communication make it feasible to undertake 100% surveillance, and certain parties consider that a desirable outcome. The same techniques make it possible to store such interceptions permanently, and current observations make that seem a likely outcome. Data storage is coming down in price stupidly quickly (a 1TB hard drive now costs half of what I paid for my first 2GB drive). Data mining techniques ensure that information can be retrieved whenever those in power want to.
Plenty (but not all) of these matters are outside PlusNet's control. But it would help my trust if the organisation did not appear to want to keep hidden those matters that are under their control. Please can you or someone post an article telling what the Ellacoyas do, how they do it, what interception capability exists, a little bit on why the Ellacoyas are necessary, and any other information that could support the PlusNet claim that they deserve to be trusted in this matter.
