Can ISPs be trusted?

[Bruno Wolff III]

On Sun, Oct 11, 2009 at 09:10:27 +0500,
  gilpel at altern.org wrote:
> 
> I took a look before writing my answer and the information I got is it's a
> mean for people on the net or your ISP to take a look at the data on your
> computer *before* it's encrypted.

Not on your computer, when it reaches the router. The original idea was that
people would be discouraged from encrypting data before it got to the
router and that law enforcement could pick it up there. Strong encryption
would be encouraged between routers to protect the traffic from other
parties.

While things didn't quite happen that way (we got dsc1000s, which were
essentially carnivore with a more mundane name, watching traffic instead
of stuff built into the routers) and especially as machines are more powerful,
encryption is being done end to end for some things. However on the low
end, people now typically have routers on the gateway for their home
networks that are plently powerful enough to snoop on local traffic. I
haven't heard of any cases of law enforcement having special firmware on
residential routers to allow them to snoop traffic, but it's pretty doable.
I suspect in most cases if they want to monitor local traffic they are
probably going to want to install keyloggers anyway and if they think
watching traffic between remote sites is good enough they can just grab
stuff going through the ISP. So it's probably a small enough niche that it's
not something that is valuable enough for them to try to get standard on
home routers.