There is a very big discussion concerning your right to privacy in the Electronic Age, and the average American has no clue they are even being watched.  Here are a couple of issues at hand.

Representatives from NBC, Microsoft, several digital filtering companies and telecom giant AT&T said the time was right to start filtering for copyrighted content at the network level.

and

E-Mail Surveillance Renews Concerns in Congress.

Filtering content?

Well for starters, every time you send an e-mail, attach a file, or request a page or content on the internet, you do it through your ISP. ISP’s like Cablevision or Verizon provide you with access to the net. You pay to use the servers.  Filtering searches for bits of code. Like a ‘copyright’. Or in the case of the NSA, an algorithm is used to find the unusual. It reads and interprets them. Copyright holders will pay big bucks to let ISP’s look for their content. The Feds will subpoena for it, and in the end, every e-mail, attachment or file will be read.

What could that possible mean to me?

Its exactly like the post office opening each and every letter looking for a copyrighted picture or a tape, or a note to Kendall Myers.  If the ISP’s ’find’ a problem, they may refuse to send it. Or they may invoke a TOS case. Or they may rat you out unless you get sanitized.

Some people feel filtering is a conspiracy; a way for ISP’s to monetize their monopoly position via a racket. Ooops, our filters caught too much Twitter traffic today, and since Twitter is not our partner, were going to slow down or deny page loads. Oops, you didn’t pay a premium, you can’t embed pictures in your e-mail. You can do these things on the fly if you monitor every packet.

Someone checking each and every file on the internet in hopes of finding someone who MAY be trading a copyrighted file or is involved in a terrorist act would be invasive, to say the least. We better make it the law that at the minimum, filtering of data must be an approved act, subject to the same principals as snail mail, and we better do it soon.

E-Mail Surveillance Renews Concerns in Congress.

Under the surveillance program, before the N.S.A. can target and monitor the e-mail messages or telephone calls of Americans suspected of having links to international terrorism, it must get permission from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Supporters of the agency say that in using computers to sweep up millions of electronic messages, it is unavoidable that some innocent discussions of Americans will be examined. Intelligence operators are supposed to filter those out, but critics say the agency is not rigorous enough in doing so.

The rising concern among some members of Congress about the N.S.A.’s recent operation are raising fresh questions about the spy agency. All we can do is implore our local Representatives to control who can open and read our e-mail. Laws need to be written to protect our privacy, and they need to be written now.

The FCC approved a proposal to open the unused broadcast television airwaves for unlicensed applications today, a move we have advocated here at The Lounge for years. The decision on The White Space today will no doubt in our mind be one of the most important steps we can make. It allows, among many other things, an avenue for broadband penetration to area’s usually not serviced by major ISP’s.

Even though the benefits of the White Space are numerous, also today the FCC has loosened rules concerning vacant fiber cable that effectively allows the local communities to provide a no to low cost internet option to students and other community members who would otherwise be unable to access service.

We will keep updated as more information becomes available on this great new technology.

Little does anyone remember, but back in the early 1990′s, there was an outcry from internet users across the country over a perceived notion that the  telephone companies were doing everything in their power to disrupt the use of dial-up modems on their networks.  Historically, internet regulation were non-existent or by the seat of the regulators pants. Today, evidence suggests that the Internet was not even recognized as a phenomenon or concern by most regulators until the mid 1990s, when it became obvious it would have a giant impact on the most basic business models. As a result, the rules or actions that can be identified with fair use do not seem to have been framed with the Internet in mind, and the time is ripe for change.

Here at The Lounge, we have been ranting for years that the Money Grubbing  Internet Service Providers be required to provide non discriminatory internet access, guaranteed speed and data access, and to be free from anti-competitive abuses and practices. As online gamers, streamers, and website owners, Lisa and I have experienced a plethora of disruptive practices from our ISP’s including attempts to cap our unlimited data plan, disruption of our online peer-to-peer gaming, and disconnects from our video streaming due to subjective issues such as ‘network congestion’ or ‘provider disruption’ All of this while we paid in excess of $50 a month for unlimited speed and data plans from ISP’s who in the end, gave us limited data and bandwidth while vilifying us as bandwidth hogs. A little history tells the story of why we must insist that ISP’s in some way shape or form take on the look of a ‘common carrier’ of old, and provide  non-discriminatory access to the world wide web.

In 1980,  the FCC ruled that firms that use basic telecommunications services to provide an enhanced service, such as information delivery, are not engaged in the provision of a basic common carrier telecommunications service, or local telephone service. Rather, they are providing an “enhanced” service and, accordingly, are not subject to the direct jurisdiction of the FCC. At the time, a telecommunications common carrier was the term used to describe a provider of telecommunications transmission service that offers its service to the public for a fee and, in contrast to a television station owner or a cable television operator, does not control the content of the information transmitted by its facilities or services. Rather, the carrier’s customer controls the content and the destination of the transmission.

Local and long distance telephone companies operated as common carriers, which historically have had close regulatory scrutiny by both federal and state agencies. The history of common carriage is fundamental to the discussion today. There was a series of FCC decisions that gave customers the right to attach approved devices directly to the network, which has allowed both ISPs and users to attach modems to their phone lines, a necessary precondition for dial-up access. Some observers also point to common carriage regulation as an important internet enabler. Entry by ISPs has been facilitated by common carrier rules which mandate nondiscriminatory access and reasonable rates apply to both the dial-up lines used by individual customers and the telephone network dedicated lines used by many ISPs to connect points of presence to the Internet. In 1997 the FCC affirmed an earlier ruling that the transmission between an end user’s premises and an enhanced service provider’s location in the same calling area would be treated as a local call, rather than as an interstate call, regardless of whether that transmission carries data, an e-mail message, or even  a voice call over the Internet. For the final years of the 20th century, the internet was truly open and free.

Today, this has all changed. The old model service providers like AOL and CompuServe who were among hundreds of providers who sold  services in a competitive market based on a ‘local call’ to a ‘common carrier’. Every day were were bombarded with offers from ISP’s who were willing to provide us with the deal of a lifetime, including free access if we were willing to dial their number. The FCC regulations of unfettered access to the network is what fostered this competition. With the advent of broadband technology, high-speed internet access has become ubiquitous. Today, a typical consumer has little or no choice in his local community in respect to a high-speed or broadband provider. A large majority of consumers are located in area’s where the only provider is the Cable TV company who in turn is the content provider for competing services. This leads to a corporate media dominance not seen since the early days of  Radio and it is quite obvious we need pro-consumer regulation at the provider level.

The simple fact is the  Service Providers have had no incentive to provide pro-consumer services and no need to create equal and unfettered access to data on their broadband networks. This, along with the consolidation of the providers makes regulation even more imperative. The real scary part is that over the last decade, has been a large contraction of  pipes, with only 4 or 5 dominate broadband providers available in the country, and the habit of these providers is to continue to use anti-consumer and disruptive practices to enhance their bottom line. Either way, as long as were are dominated by just a few providers and those providers continue to disrupt the flow of information on their networks, we must force the F.C.C. to regulate these providers for the good of the people.