The rise and fall of ISP surveillance

Ohm asserts that we should focus on individual harms stemming from surveillance and recognize that technological, economic, and ethical forces all point towards a “storm of unprecedented, invasive ISP monitoring” (4). He maintains that ISPs oversell their ability to anonymize collected data, that providers’ claims of needing to more deeply inspect content are suspect, and that we should distrust suggestions that users and ISPs have entered consensual agreements around DPI-based surveillance. To determine the risk of individual harms stemming from surveillance, ISPs and regulators should adopt a three-step process that asks how sensitive is the information at risk, whether there there been harmful breaches in the past and if so, requires policymakers to make predictions about the future.

Critically, “anonymity cannot effectively address the harm to the sense of repose. The harm comes from the fear that one is being watched. It can result in self-censorship. It is not the kind of harm that is easily offset by hypertechnical arguments about encryption and one-way hash functions” (49). Thus, novel surveillance systems like DPI must be (largely) restricted to preventing hacking and viral outbreaks and traditional monitoring systems that cannot capture personal information relied upon for network management. Most importantly, Ohm argues that privacy, freedom, liberty, and autonomy must be introduced into the otherwise technocratic discussions of network neutrality and management to ensure that ISPs’ networks facilitate these key democratic values.

Bibliographic information:

Ohm, Paul. (2008). The rise and fall of ISP surveillance. University of Illinois Law Review 1417.

If you’re interested in downloading Christopher Parsons’ full annotated bibliography about deep packet inspection, click here.

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About Christopher Parsons

Christopher is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Victoria. He is currently attending to a particular set of technologies that facilitate digitally mediated surveillance, including Deep Packet Inspection (DPI), behavioral advertising, and mobile devices. He thinks through how these technologies influence citizens in their decision to openly express themselves or engage in self-censoring behavior on a regular basis. He blogs at Technology, Thoughts, and Trinkets and is @caparsons on Twitter.
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