What does my ISP know?

[Broomiebar]

Nihil

Why would they want to do such a thing?

I wish I could answer that...
let's just say the less they know, the better it is .

[nihil]

Hi Broomiebar

Only you can be the judge of this as you will best know the situation. Over here the ISPs are all private commercial; outfits and would not do what you suggest as it would cost a lot and they would have no benefit.

If the law enforcement or security agencies want surveillance, they would have at least to be reasonably specific, as there is just too much traffic on the net to look at everything. So you don't want to be on a list of suspicious people.

What they might do is look for people using VPN/encryption and so on because they apparently have something to hide. So, you could actually draw attention to yourself?

The most obvious method is to have a list of "suspect sites" and have ISPs monitor for connections to those.

Just a few thoughts

[Broomiebar]

What they might do is look for people using VPN/encryption and so on

Wich somewhat prooves my point that there is a filtering/monitoring process
that goes on under the table, and the person in charge of doing that ...
(depending wether he respects people's privacy or just because he may find it amusing
while being bored at the office) could at anytime decide to click on
few things and read as much he wants.


That's what's annoying me the most.

[pcllwftdtm]

Okay, I work for a fortune 500 ISP.

I am assuming that you are not using Dialup, or some other service in which your IP is changing per connection. Sure they can track you by username and pass, but really, there isnt much they can see with out spending alot of time and resources and some one prevously mentioned.

Right now, most ISP's log what time you connect, how long you stay connected, the ammount of information is sent durring these sessions, and how/why the connection has failed. Some times they'll even log the signal quality of the connection too. Now, MOST ISP dont even look at these logs, there's just too many. However, they do monitor traffic in terms of bandwidth/content. I know my company doesnt do this, but others have been known to catch their users running servers and what not from their home.

And the way they get caught is by bandwidth... we'll notice if you are uploading Gigabytes of info.

Now of course they do have tools so that if you are suspect of spamming, or kiddyporn, or hosting a bot network, or some other sort of illegal activity, then they can take further measures, but as mentioned above, really encryption is your best bet.

[zencoder]

Originally posted here by Broomiebar
Wich somewhat prooves my point that there is a filtering/monitoring process
that goes on under the table, and the person in charge of doing that ...
(depending wether he respects people's privacy or just because he may find it amusing
while being bored at the office) could at anytime decide to click on
few things and read as much he wants.


That's what's annoying me the most.

Sounds like a paranoid delusion to me. Up your anti-psychotics dosage.

[nihil]

Wich somewhat prooves my point that there is a filtering/monitoring process that goes on under the table

Only if you live in a place with a very small internet presence, a state monopoly of it, and a totalitarian regime.

Otherwise you will probably find that the internet is filtered to exclude what the regime considers to be "unacceptable" sites.

It is really similar to the network in a large corporation. Activity is monitored but only by exception, in accordance with the AUP and so on. Otherwise you would be swamped in an information overload. Only when suspicious activity is detected is further analysis carried out.

This is why I mentioned that by taking unusual actions you might have the negative effect of drawing attention to yourself. Sometimes it is best to hide in plain sight.

What pcllwftdtm says, sounds pretty much the case over here in the EU. They monitor for their TOS/AUP as they can bill you for any "extras". They don't care what you do so long as you pay for it. Interception would only take place at the request of law enforcement/security agencies.

You might also bear in mind that unusual security can attract criminal attention as well as that of the authorities.

Your profile flag is Liberia, is that where you are located?

Good luck

[brokencrow]

I've got some friends that run a small ISP in southern KY. They could care less about what their users are doing until a warrant comes in (believe it or not, warrants are generally faxed to them!).

ISP's scanning people's computers? I don't think so. Lawdy, I hear this paranoid stuff all the time.

I always assumed that what an ISP definitely has on you are ip addresses. Your ip address, and all the ip addresses visited by your ip address. It's highly unlikely they're doing any packet captures unless it's in conjunction with law enforcement, so even having all those ip's doesn't mean they know what you're doing at any given site.

TOR's will give you much more anonymity. VPN's too. Speaking of which, try iPig. I use it a bit in the coffeehouses.

I don't think encryption draws any attention to you. It's used much more than folks realize.

[Broomiebar]

Sounds like a paranoid delusion to me. Up your anti-psychotics dosage.

No comments...you're a mod.

Thank you Brokenarrow that's a lot of help, I like to hear inside stories like that....

Message received Nihil, thanks!

[ShippMA]

Hi Guys,

Just to drop in some personal experience with Blueyonder here in the UK. Sorry to be vague but it was a little while ago now.

I have been using there broadband service now for about 18 months. When i first got setup with them i immedately put Zone Alarm on. Now every hour or so zone alarm would flash up one of those warnings saying that there has been some suspect activity on X, at first i just ignored them as zone alarm was just dropping the activity and letting me know that someone had tried to do something but that it just dropped the info and nothing happened. After a week or so of this i decided to actually look at what was happening just in case it was something i should worry about and lo and behold it was blueyonder.

Now it was 18 months ago now and i honestly can't remember what zonealarm said they were doing, or on what port they were doing it. I suspect it was probably an automated scan trying to see what was connected to that connection and i would imagine that if anything unusual flagged up (like a server or multiple machines) there would be some kind of automated response like sending an e-mail to customer support to notify that i'm doing X wrong.

If i get time i'll try to dig into ZA and see if i have had any recently, i have told ZA not to notify of them anymore so i honestly couldn't tell you whether i still get them or not.

Saying all this i would be extremely surprised if:

a) Blueyonder looked at any of my e-mail, like pcllwftdtm said theres just too many customers to do that, even if it were legal.
b) Blueyonder looked at the sites i visit. I would imagine they have filters for known suspect sites, but that actually they only do anything with the info if they get a specific warrant from the police for person X as again i'm sure its illegal for the police to say to them tell me all users that go to site X.

So in summary i'd say your relatively safe from your ISP, just look at all the queries saying this little git has been doing X and i have talked to there ISP and hey wont do anything, what do i do? If someone has proof of wrong doing and they wont look at it whay would they look at anyone with no proof of wrong doing?

[@tt!tud3]

greetings ShippMa

You'll probably find it was another BlueYonder customer rather than the ISP itself. Alternatively, some cable ISPs can use keepalives etc -- blocking those can make the ISP think you're offline and drop the connection.

i'm sure its illegal for the police to say to them tell me all users that go to site X.

Not necessarily. I can't speak for where you are, but down here if a sufficiently senior police officer makes an s282 request for specific information from an ISP, the ISP is legally required to turn over any relevant records they have. Many ISPs deliberately minimise/avoid logging web browsing etc to avoid the overhead of having to respond to these requests too often (compelling the ISP to actually turn on logging requires a telecommunications interception warrant, with a far higher standard of probable cause).