Is this so-called 'National Security Operation' Funded by US taxpayer dollars thru the goose stepping US Department of Homeland Security OR thru much higher USA ISP charges to their customers?"If you download potentially copyrighted software, videos or music, your Internet service provider has been watching, and they're coming for you. Specifically, they're coming for you on Thursday, July 12. 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." One day, years from now, historians are going to debate whether this was the point of no return.[1]
While encrypted SSL, HTTPS connections on both ends of a file transfer would make it very difficult for a users ISP to sniff out the potential files you may or may not be transferring to or from, the ISP could certainly log who you are logged to.
Also Americans purchasing a copyrighted movie or music track/album appear to have the legal right for a digital backup which would include obtaining that via a torrent download or direct P2P file transfer. Apparently such police state operations are going to push American citizens into obtaining and having copious amounts of records of licences, copy-writes and end-user agreements HANDY and Available. Many of the older Linux users laughed when Cheech and Chong pantomimed half crazed <violates forum rules> troopers demanding papers from some old man demanding, 'show me ze papers ole man'. Well, such 'reality' NOW across USA could very well mean far more than your photo ID, passport and birth certificate but a truck load of copyright agreements and end user contracts. Are YOU Missing 5 or 10 out of the 300 copyright licenses investigators demanded? Hope for a understanding local non-federal Jury because it is very likely the US DOJ will try to make scape goats of those swept up in the first few years and the prison sentences and fines are likely going to be pretty extreme.
Just the vast IT equipment specifically used to sniff and watch and log major ISP customers is bound to be expensive and you can bet the farm YOU are going to be paying for that, thru taxpayer funding and thru higher ISP prices. PLUS there is bound to be a tidal wave of false notifications to USA ISP customers notifying them that because they downloaded 30 Gigabytes last month, they must have broken some unknown, double secret USA law regarding alleged copyrighted files. Some suggested fines have been posted at 150,000 dollars which of course is totally outrageous but given the police state environment in the US government, very likely also. This is bound to have a heavy blow-back on the entertainment industry and their cough Apartheid State Middle East league of attorney's.
Meanwhile I would suggest:
1) Using full encryption when possible, https whenever that is available.
2) Routinely shuttle your client out traffic thru a Elite Proxy Server (Elite Proxy's scrub all forwarding information OFF and many do not cache any data either making them very Anonymous and not evident they are in fact a Proxy Server). Your ISP would track/log you connecting to that (Elite Proxy) IP but not obtain who that proxy was linked to nor if the connection were encrypted what the data packets contained in any fashion to sniff out a copyright violation or not.
3) You might consider also obtaining a private VPN service you can then use should that need arise also.
4) You might consider adding encryption to your email handler such as OpenPgP, and TrueCrypt to your entire system's Hard Drive which has been proven to stop goose stepping agencys dead in their tracks provided your passphrase/token file is reasonably strong.
Reference:
[1] http://www.osnews.com/story/25647/US_IS ... me_July_12