Ars Technica – September 19, 2007:
It’s no secret that US content owners want the “middlemen” of the Internet economy to better police their networks and services for material that infringes copyright.
NBC Universal has been one of the big drivers behind this push to outsource the work of filtering to the ISPs. NBC’s general counsel Rick Cotton recently told the FCC that ISPs should be forced to “use readily available means to prevent the use of their broadband capacity to transfer pirated content.” Otherwise, corn farmers could be harmed.
Rather amazingly, given the money and time that will be required to implement such a system, AT&T has agreed to start filtering content at some mysterious point in the future.
Net neutrality rules, if passed, might throw up some roadblocks. It’s no wonder, then, that NBC and the MPAA as a whole are opposed to such rules.
We’ve written about AT&T’s eagerness to police the interwebitubes previously.
This story is a smokescreen. It came out the very day that Prez Bush went to Congress to get the “Protect America Act” extended, perhaps made permanent. And get the Carriers (AT&T, Verizon, etc) exempt from any legal actions and law suits, concerning illegal wiretapping and monitoring of emails. AT&T just happen to be the first one exposed as having created a facility for doing this, to the NSA’s specifications.
http://www.pbs.org/now/shows/307/spy-scandal.html
http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/09/19/america/NA-GEN-US-Eavesdropping.php
And if Bush wants to exempt all carriers from future law suits, then obvious others beside AT7T are either snooping in on the email, or soon will be.
I appologize for the duplicate posting. But if you look closely I had to change it a few times, in minor ways. That was because D.U. kept refusing to confirm it. Only after omitting the “standardnewswire” link did it go thru. But then surprise, the earlier to attempts were also recorded. So John going to have to figure out why that happens. Can’t have this “blacklist” notice popping up for no reason.
Wow using the AT&T logo as the death star…that’s original.
gizmodo.com has been using that graphic for months now.