ISP’s Log all your Internet Activity

There is an information war going on, you may not be fully aware of it but it’s happening right now and your ISP logs could end up being rather important. The internet makes a global surveillance society a very real possibility, the only restrictions were possibly storage to hold the huge amount of data, but technological advances have made that less of an issue nowadays. The fact that an ISP log contains all your data, all your communications, every web site you visit and what you download makes it a fantastic way to track people, monitor their actions basically anything they do online.

But there’s much,much more going on – I have mentioned before in my blog about how hackers and identity thieves advertise ‘free anonymous proxies’ in order to gather lots of ID information, card numbers and account passwords well there is a huge underworld activity where millions of these numbers and records are traded, bought and sold.

One of the more famous of the sites was called Darkmarket, it was closed down late last year. Rather ironically it has actually been run for the last two years by the FBI – see the link for a report below.

It shows you how sophisticated this war has become – that thousands of hackers and underworld carders were actually doing business on a server administered by the FBI. Rather funny really and I hope they caught loads of them ! I wonder how many were dumb enough to not protect their connections and IP addresses, even if they used a simple proxy I bet few encrypted their connections to block ISP logs

In some ways this is a more acceptable way of catching criminals online, instead of trawling through the personal data of you and I at our ISPs then they just target a website dedicated to criminal acts such as identity theft, carding and criminal activity. Sounds fairer to me and much better than forcing ISPs to keep all our logs and data so they can check if we’re up to no good. There is a big difference in my mind between giving access to our ISP logs to spy on us all and logging the activities of a web site dedicated to criminal acts.

Read the excellent story on the FBI sting here – FBI Sting Darkmarket