Can ISPs be trusted?

[Bruno Wolff III]

On Fri, Oct 09, 2009 at 00:27:13 +0500,
  gilpel at altern.org wrote:
> Most people trust their ISP, and rightly so, I suppose. But what if an ISP
> was a vilain? :) What kind of access would it have to its users'
> computers? Isn't it the same as a client connected to a server? The server
> being root, it has full access to the client.

Many ISPs do bogus things. You have to trust them to a great extent since
they can see and modify traffic between you and the rest of the internet.

If you don't want them to see your internal traffic you can take steps
to do that. Running a router with your own software on it, between there
modem/router and the rest of your network with appropriate packet filtering
will help protect you from "private doorbell" type stuff.