Virgin Media Wants to Spy on You

[TheBigotBasher]

Virgin Media is now acting as chief lapdog to the Lord Mandleson sell out of the internet to the dying music distribution industry. Virgin Media is to trial deep packet inspection technology to measure the level of so called illegal filesharing on its network. Customers being monitored will not be informed.

Virgin will use a product called CView, sold by Detica, a BAE subsidiary that specialises in large volume data collection and processing, and whose traditional customers are the intelligence agencies and law enforcement. BAE profited massively from the Neo Con Labour War in Iraq and Afghanistan, now it looks set to profit again from The War Against Piracy.

The CView product will operate at the centre of the Virgin Media network with an aim of estimating the proportion of filesharing traffic that infringes copyright.

40 per cent of Virgin Media's traffic will be monitored. If you are on Virgin and are not being monitored today, tomorrow may well be. If this is truly limited to peer to peer traffic then your next game on your XBOX 360 may be monitored. It would be all but impossible to identify the difference between a game played on your XBOX 360 and an encrypted bit torrent file. This will therefore exaggerate the amount of "illegal" bit torrent traffic.

The system will look at traffic to identify peer-to-peer packets. The programme then looks at those packets to determine what is licensed and what is unlicensed, based on data provided by the record industry.

Virgin promises data will be aggregated and and made anonymous. The trial though has no scheduled end date.

It should be remembered that CView uses the the same technology that powered the Phorm advertising system, which monitored individual internet users to target advertisements. It too was trialled - by BT - without customers' consent or knowledge. The Government faces an EU investigation for allowing this.

Detica will want to sell this to other ISPs. So there may be no escape from this. Once all ISPs have this, how anonymous will traffic be then?

Virgin Media's implementation will they promise focus on music sharing. Of course their proposed music download service has nothing to do with this. Are you sure you will not be flagged because of a video you watch on youtube or even Vidzone on the PS3? Do you trust the list provided by the Music Industry?

Detica has is also trying to flog CView to the Government. In the sales document, Detica said that as well as aggregate data, CView could be used to categorise filesharers and apply technical measures against them, or target them to be sold legal alternatives.

Welcome to Digital Britain.

[ikri]

1. Questionable legality

Considering that the EU is about a hair's breadth away from suing the UK government over the lack of action over Phorm I don't believe that this would pass DPA, or EU data retention laws (plus it probably violates the RIP act).

Besides, all this will do is push people towards encrypted torrents and foreign VPN providers.

[fedsron2us]

2. There is no such thing as completely anonymous web traffic

unless you have connected using someone elses computer, ISP and id. Your activities are always being logged somewhere. With regard to monitoring packet traffic to protect copyright if the technology can not between legal and illegal content then it seems pointless. Are you suggesting that Virgin Media and the other ISPs are going to start revoking the connections of everyone who uses Youtube regardless of what is being viewed ? If they do that then they are going to start to lose customers and revenue at an alarming rate. I can't see that being good for their balance sheets. As for the music industry they might like to ponder the thought that Britains declining youth demographic might explain why they can not flog as many records as they did in the 1970s.