Rogers Cable’s Deep Packet Inspection Similar To Wiretapping Your Phone?
There is a battle brewing and at stake is the control or lack of it that you or your business will have over your internet connection and experience. Many have discussed the issue of Net Neutrality but for many Canadian users, individuals and businesses, it is still a concept that has proven difficult to grasp.
Rogers Cable and Bell have both begun getting their hands dirty with your data and now some of the consequences of not adhering to a policy of Net Neutrality are beginning to become more evident to paying customers of Rogers Cable and Bell’s high-speed internet offerings. Over the coming weeks and months, I will be focusing some of my posts on the various issues and angles surrounding the Net Neutrality debate and how it can impact you personally and-or your business.
What is Deep Packet Inspection?
Imagine a typical highway that was divided up into two lanes, a fast lane and slow lane. Now imagine that at every on-ramp to the highway was an inspection booth that each driver had to pass through before getting on the highway. At this booth, an officer would inspect your car and its contents and then make a decision as to which lane you were permitted to travel on. On a very basic level, that is what Deep Packet Inspection is all about. Rogers Cable and Bell have now begun inspecting your data that you upload or download from the web, and are then subsequently forcing you into one of those two lanes depending on the contents of your data. What gets your data into the slow lane? If it’s data intensive files like music or video, that is something the DPI (virtual) officers will flag you for and toss you into the slow lane. Today, that is the criteria, but tomorrow or next year you might end up in the slow lane for things like ie- viewing a competitor’s web offering. Hence the parallel to wiretapping your phone – ISPs are listening in on your data, and making judgements based on what they discover.
Why use Deep Packet Inspection?
The Internet Service Providers (ISP) will tell you that deep packet inspection is necessary in order to ensure that there is enough bandwidth available (especially during peak hours) to ensure that all types of traffic are getting through. With the rise of online video and peer-to-peer file sharing, the ISPs claim that these data-intensive tasks are putting basic services like email traffic at risk of not getting through. In order to ensure that all traffic continues to move, Rogers Cable and Bell have begun using deep packet inspection to relegate certain types of uploading and downloading to the slow lane on the highway.
How far can Deep Packet Inspection go?
I don’t want to sound overly alarmist or get too Orwellian on you but the stakes are high and your privacy could some day be caught in the Deep Packet Inspection cross-hairs.
…but some of these devices (Deep Packet Inspection devices) can go much further; those from a company like Narus (Deep Packet Inspection hardware provider), for instance, can look inside all traffic from a specific IP address, pick out the HTTP traffic, then drill even further down to capture only traffic headed to and from Gmail, and can even reassemble e-mails as they are typed out by the user.
In my next post focusing on Net Neutrality, I will provide some real-world examples of how deep packet inspection is being used by ISPs like Rogers Cable and Bell.
In the meantime, if you would like to learn more about Net Neutrality check out the Wikipedia page and consider signing the Canadian petition for Net Neutrality over at Neutrality.ca.
quote source ars technica
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