Folding @ home and SETI are two things that send and receive encrypted packets over the interwebs and are heavily used through out the world. Also, what if your network has been jacked, and your neighbor is stealing your wireless and using your public IP to do bad things.

This doesn't include encrypted traffic from home to office for whatever work reasons you might need. I am sure it can all add up. Plus you can throttle bandwidth via P2P preference anyway, so you can lower it to that of one of those clients. Then how will they justify coming to take a peek at your hard drive?

File sharing is not a national or international threat. Its just piracy, and I don't see how they can link it to the whole national security thing. However, I do agree that once a government wants to do something they often do it, regardless of your rights.

Might I mention that this line of thinking dovetails very nicely, indeed, with the telecom companies’ attempts to torpedo Internet neutrality.

If they had their way, you would be getting one invoice for access from your ISP, and a second one from them where the bottom line is contingent on your traffic! And voluminous traffic from non-commercial sites might well nevertheless flow like syrup.

Ah, the blessings of a virtually tiered Internet! ;)


And Tom, I’m not an expert, but I would suspect there are markers (or at least Sender and Recipient) that effectively identify SETI and Folding@home traffic. Same thing goes for home<-->office, which would largely be considered uninteresting.

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Obviously, you are much more reasonable and rational in your thought processes than government often seems to be.

When one considers how the interstate commerce clause of the Constitution has been stretched to allow all sorts of federal activity that, to me, at least, seems patently unconstitutional, linking piracy to national security is just a matter of a few simple steps.

For example: piracy violates federal law; unless federal law is enforced, the authority of the government is subverted; if the authority of the government is subverted, it is unable to perform necessary functions; if it can't perform necessary functions, national security is at risk; ergo, it must have the means to ensure that piracy does not occur. These are exactly the type of "logical:rolleyes:" linkages that have been made to authorize lots of things under the "interstate commerce" umbrella.

Arctic, you are correct there are ways to track traffic even encrypted to see where it is going. Obviously something as simple as a reverse DNS look up could tell you if the IP were a folding @ home server or a SETI server.

However, all other traffic that can not be traced to a valid source is deemed as piracy? I mean there are tons of legal things you can download via P2P which I am always sharing. I have an 8 gig ISO file of a collection Linux live ISOs, that is like a sampler platter so to speak of open source operating systems. I have been sharing it in my bittorrent client for over a year now and have probably uploaded 100s of gigs of information just to that particular ISO file.

This is totally legal, generates lots of traffic (and yes I encrypt all out going torrent traffic), and I feel that I am doing my part supporting the open source community. After all I don't pay to use fedora, debian, ubuntu or open suse, so I figure why not share my bandwidth?

How is someone going to prove otherwise in court with out cracking my encryption? Unless I am going to obvious public torrent trackers that have my IP registered. Even then they would need to subpoena my ISP and the torrent tracker server owner to legally get that information.

I am aware that they can use fear and scare tactics to accomplish what they want, and its not right.

Is there a petition? Where do I sign, where do i protest? Where do I voice my opinion about this matter?

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In a new article the BBC offers an interesting pan-European look at surveillance.