July 12, 2012: The Day ISPs Start Spying On Customers

July 12, 2012: The Day ISPs Start Spying On Customers

15 March 2012  –  Technology

By David K. Sutton
11:24pm

If you are in the habit of downloading copyrighted media, including software, music and videos, be warned that beginning on Thursday July 12th your ISP will start spying on your activity. The Raw Story reports, “That’s the date when the nation’s largest ISPs will all voluntarily implement a new anti-piracy plan that will engage network operators in the largest digital spying scheme in history, and see some users’ bandwidth completely cut off until they sign an agreement saying they will not download copyrighted materials.”

Of course the usual suspects are behind this plan including the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the Motion Picture Association of American (MPAA). The plan is backed by all major ISPs (Comcast, Verizon, Time Warner Cable, Cablevision, AT&T) and has the support of the Obama administration.

Penalties for offenders can include reduced bandwidth, access reduced to a limited number of websites, and complete internet service cut-off. ISPs can require customers to attend “an education course” if they want service restored. And of course offenders can be charged with copyright infringement by the studios.

A CNET News article quotes RIAA CEO Cary Sherman, “Each ISP has to develop their infrastructure for automating the system.” Sherman said ISPs are developing systems to keep track of repeat infringers which will allow them to send “first notice or the third notice.” CNET reports that ISPs will use a “graduated response” approach. This approach requires ISPs to “send out one or two educational notices to customers accused of downloading copyrighted content illegally. If the customer doesn’t stop, the ISP is then asked to send out ‘confirmation notices’ asking that they confirm they have received notice.” If accused customers continue to pirate material the ISP can then begin to impose the before mentioned restrictions.

Veil of Isis

At the end of the eighteenth century, the same judicial metaphor is found in Kant, in the preface to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason. For him, physics began to make decisive progress from the moment when, with Francis Bacon, Galileo, Torricelli, and Stahl, it understood that it had to ‘oblige nature to answer its questions.’ With regard to nature, reason must behave “not like a student, who lets himself be told whatever the teacher wishes, but like an appointed judge, who forces witnesses to answer the questions he asks them.” Curvier’s celebrated formula takes up the same metaphor: “the observer listens to Nature, the experimenter submits it to interrogation and forces it to unveil itself.” And even when Bacon says that “nature can be commanded only by obeying it,” thus appearing to urge scientists to submit to nature, one cannot help thinking, with Eurenio Garin, evoking the comedies of Plautus, that for Bacon, “man is a tricky servant who studies his master’s habits in order to be able to do whatever he wants with him.

Here violence becomes ruse, and the Greek word that denotes ruse is precisely μηχανή, mēkhanē. For the Greeks, mechanics first appeared as a technique for tricking nature, particularly by producing movements that appear to be contrary to nature, and by obliging nature to do what it cannot do by itself, by means of artificial and fabricated instruments, or “machines”–scales, winches, levers, pulleys, wedges, screws, gears–which can serve, for instance, for the construction of war machines or automata.

– Pierre Hadot, The Veil of Isis (Harvard, 2004; 94)