CircleID

MSNBC reports that an Australian company, Brilliant Digital Entertainment Ltd., is marketing a new controversial deep packet inspection technology called CopyRouter in the U.S. cable of allowing ISPs to check every file passing through their network. More specifically, this technology can check "every image, every movie, every document attached to an email or found in a Web search," to see if it matches a list of illegal images from a law enforcement agency.

"The company caught the attention of New York's attorney general, who has been pressing Internet companies to block child porn," according to the MSNBC report. "He forwarded the proposal to one of those companies, AOL, for discussion by an industry task force that is looking for ways to fight child porn."

Objections have been raised by various privacy advocates urging that monitoring all ISP traffic would be an unconstitutional invasion of privacy. "This would be plainly illegal in the United States, whether or not a governmental official imposed this on an ISP or the ISP did this voluntarily," says John Morris of the Center for Democracy and Technology. "If I were the general counsel of an ISP, I wouldn't touch this with a 10-foot pole."

Read full story: MSNBC

Related topics: Access Providers, Broadband, Censorship, P2P, Privacy, Telecom