A Bit of My Life » Is Your ISP Watching You? Find Out Soon Canada.

Is Your ISP Watching You? Find Out Soon Canada.

Canadians worried about the coming copyright legislation should be armed with all of the tools possible in order to combat against their personal information being shared with the government.

What a lot of people are not putting together on the copyright legislation story is the fact that ACTA is coming out shortly as well. The Copyright legislation is just one component of a one-two punch that will have most Canadians ponying up fines faster than you can say “how do I cash in my RRSP?”. The copyright legislation simply gives ACTA teeth.

What is ACTA? Basically the government, or law enforcement, can call up your ISP and demand your records. If they see things that they don’t like in there, which will include downloaded music and movies, you will be fined enormous amounts of money under the new copyright legislation. Of course, they will also see your proclivities for midget porn as well, and dagnabbit, noone should have access to my midge lovin’.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has come out with a set of tools that will allow you to check up on your ISP to see if they are storing information on your internet habits. If they are, then it is time to switch to one that is not doing this BEFORE the legislation is voted through, not after. Besides; do you really want to stick with an ISP that is doing this in the first place? Why go with an ISP that already has the tools in place? When you call around to change, ask them if they would hand over your records if required to by law. There are a few out there that will say “No.”. The big guys aren’t one of those that will say no.

This article gives a blow-by-blow on how to install the necessary tool and library. OK, so this really isn’t an option for everyone as not everyone can install the Python library. However, if we are talking about guarding your personal freedom, there is no time like the present to learn.

You also should consider switching if you have ever received a letter or an e-mail asking you to stop using so much bandwidth. This means that the ISP is closely monitoring your activities, and probably storing data on you. No need to install the tool if you have received this warning sign; just switch.

I will be looking for a new ISP myself in the coming months, as I have received in the past an e-mail from Cogeco stating that we went over our download capacity. It didn’t bother me too much before I started reading current news, but boy does it bother me now. That and I can’t see Cogeco saying no to the government, ever.

Here is the screening process I plan to use for my new ISP.

1a. Do you currently collect data on your user’s packets?

If no…

1. Do you know about Acta?
2. If not, send them article.
3. Now that you know about Acta, will you start collecting information on your subscribers if asked to by the government?

I’ll let everyone know which ISP I chose after I go through my process of screening them - and even if they tell me that they don’t use data storage on user habits, I’m still installing the Python tool to check them out anyway.

Update:

Apparently Google is coming out with the tools for you to monitor your ISP. No Python library required! Yay Google! Unfortunately we don’t know when, so my recommendation still stands to get friendly with your inner Python. No, I didn’t mean heading over to RedTube.com, you sicko. And you are going to have to actually type it in, I’m not going to link to it.

Posted: June 16th, 2008 under Canada Copyright Reform, Technobabble.
Comments: none

Main menu:

Categories

Is Your ISP Watching You? Find Out Soon Canada.

Write a comment