All your packets belong to us:

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070613-att-willing-to-spy-for-nsa-mpaa-and-riaa.html

And before you know it there will be a gap in the market for a competing telecom company to offer "DRM free traffic"!

It will never fly...

Who are you more scared of: NSA, or the *IAA organizations?

Maybe not, because AT&T owns critical backbones. Get a couple more companies on board and you can control 75% of the backbone.

Question for those not worried about this. How are you going to use the internet without touching the backbone at some point.

Wait til corporate America figures out this means "we break your VPNs"...

> we break your VPNs"...

How will it do that? Encryption will be the way to screw these systems.

They can't allow that though, because their system would be broken then.

Sounds like a bunch of hot air and public pandering. They may as well pay some lip service to the notion if they can get big entities like *IAA's on their side.

We do need another cold war. I suppose many of us aren't in bad seats for a technological arms race.

> They can't allow that though,

They don't have a choice. No company will send clear text period.

Hence the breakage?

It's all just a power-drunken pass at the *IAAs anyways.

After she spreads her legs for Ma Bell's red-headed bastard step child, they won't get so much as a phone call.

Exactly.  You can either allow VPN and forget about tracking packets, or you can track packets and disallow VPN.  Not both.  So basically AT&T is promising to break VPNs.

"Approved" VPNs would function - all you'd need is 100 identity points to set one up and hand over a copy of the keys to the regulators.

Right.  And large companies would go right along with that.

In reality, they'd just start laying cable of their own that never touched the AT&T backbone.  There are several fully capable of it, and would do it if it meant maintaining communication between their branches.  Start with banks.

> just start laying cable of their own that never touched the AT&T backbon

It's a monopoly business so it's unlikely anyone could do this. You just need to do what Google did, buy dark fibre and create your own network.

Cable television laid a lot of wire, same as telephone companies, and power companies.  There has to be a way to lay wire, and I suspect banks have the money and will to make it happen if it comes to that.

But yes, buying/leasing dark fiber is probably a better solution.

Hell, building a network of wireless towers could work, too.

Thre are plenty of private WANS totally disconnected or fiercely firewalled from the Internet running on top of the general carriers. Most governments rely on them, as do banks. Sprint, IBM (and several others) purchase bandwidth for resale as a service to their clients.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide_area_network

What's new is the carriers wanting to move up the food chain.

If you build anything on top of the carriers it's not private. It all flows through carrier switches which all have taps running off into NSA storage and analysis systems. Anything over the spectrum is recordable.

You would have to run a private cable between locations for it to be safe, and even that can be tapped without you knowing.

This can be circumvented with encrypted P2P traffic. uTorrent already supports encryption for torrents.

Of course, that kind of countermeasure is unnecessary. By the looks of things this is a large scale government IT project created for regulatory reasons and having to do some pretty clever pattern recognition.

And that's why it's destined to fail.