On Mar 30, 2009, at 2:48 AM, Mark Smith wrote:
I'd have thought they should be keen to avoid that, unless all of theircustomers are all under or likely to all under surveilence at the same time!
ISP architectures are not designed around surveillance; they are organized for control. That said, if a subpoena comes in, the effect of surveillance is not supposed to be detectable by the surveillance subject. If routing suddenly changed, and especially if local connectivity that the surveillance subject was using disappeared, that would be a pretty major tip-off.
In case you're questioning the "control" aspects, the issue is primarily that an ISP offers services to its customers under an SLA, and is responsible to enforce the SLA. For example, if the are guaranteeing me, or making representations to me of, a specific bandwidth, they can't allow another customer to do something that prevents me from getting that amount of bandwidth. As a result, they will generally run traffic on networks they operate through equipment that enables them to have the level of control they need, and they reserve the right (as RFC 2309 suggests) to force top talkers to back off when necessary to make that happen.