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.

Here at the Lounge, we have been talking for years about how broadband providers have manipulated our bandwidth to increase profits on their content side. How ISP’s are proposing Deep Packet Inspection for network management and  e-mail, and how that’s like the post office charging for a ghetto stamp. We have talked quite often about the need for more competition in the broadband market and how in competitive markets, ISPs act much more pro-consumer. We talked about how in markets that do lack competition, the cable industry has flooded State and Local government with FUD and untold $$millions while lobbying for regulations that stifle competition and innovation.

The one thing we haven’t talked about is Net Neutrality. What is it, how it can help us diversify our media choices and how it just might stimulate a whole new world of media distribution, like the Television did 50 years ago. Hulu, Ruku, XBox, Tivo and Boxee are popular alternatives to the traditional cable distribution model, and those Money Grubbing Cable TV shysters are doing everything to make them fail. It’s time we helped, and Net Neutrality might just be the law we all need.

The idea behind net neutrality is that the owner of the plumbing should not care what the plumbing is used for or who uses it. This means that just because you are the local cable company, you cannot discriminate in how your Internet service is priced to benefit your other businesses. Streaming a 3 gig movie should not, for example, be more expensive than streaming the same amount of data from a cable branded stream. Net Neutrality would address the DPI issue in that it would de-monetize the data, it would make it illegal to click-watch without opt-in, and make it illegal to ‘cap for crap’ unless the Exaflood really does happen. In a nutshell, it would make the Internet a dumb pipe, just what they invented 20 years ago.

The carriers very much want the FCC to stay as far away as possible from the network neutrality debate. And if their actions are any indication, they are trying very hard to push through as much change before the government steps in. In proposing what looked like Internet pricing intended to ward off competition to its cable TV business, Time Warner set off  a shit storm of criticism. This time around, it looks like Congress is starting to get involved, and where Congress goes the FCC soon follows. A Democrat-controlled FCC will probably not roll over for cable companies quite as easily as the Bush FCC did. After seeing this particular danger lurking, Time Warner bailed on the new pricing, at least for now. This was a direct result of the potential for increased oversight, not because the average customer would pay much higher prices. TW really doesn’t give a crap about you the customer, and that’s why I expect it to show up again in somewhat different form sometime in the next few months. Either way, everyone must understand that laws are needed now. Once these pricing plans go live, there will be very little we can do about it.

In closing, there is simply was no reasonable justification for the per-gigabyte pricing that Time Warning Cable was proposing. I cannot imagine a situation in which a gigabyte of Internet data should cost $1 from the cable company, when it costs them about 3 cents to produce in a non-competitive market. I strongly believe that Internet companies should provide either access or content, but not both. Verizon should not discriminate against Yahoo because it has a deal with Google. The Internet carrier should handle traffic for both companies equally. Time Warner was planning to charge those kind of rates to help kill the ‘On-Demand video market. That’s a fact. The way I look at it, Net Neutrality may be the only thing between me and all those streaming re-runs of Speed Racer.