Topic: Internet Routing Violates Privacy

[jcobban]

I am having a problem with my current Internet provider, which is why it is shortly to become my former Internet provider.

I observed extremely unpredictable response times and frequent disconnects when accessing my business web-site, which is hosted in a major city only 250 miles away. When I did the traceroute I found that for no obvious reason the packets were being routed across the international border between Canada and the US, even though both I and the web-site are located in the same country. The bad response time was because the route was pushing the time to live (TTL) value in the packet header.

But more serious is that routing traffic across the international border guarantees that a copy of my traffic is delivered to the US National Security Agency and the Canadian Communication Security Establishment, two of the "Five Eyes". If the traffic had not been routed across the border the federal authorities would have needed a court order to intercept the traffic.

I complained about this routing both to the Internet provider and the federal privacy commissioner but the Internet provider simply did not respond and the privacy commissioner reported that when this issue has been raised in the past the Internet providers, as a group, just whine "its too hard!".

Strangely I cannot find anywhere on the web where this privacy concern is discussed.