Irreal

I wish these guys were my ISP. Although it won’t be news to Irreal’s European readers, Americans may not be aware that British PM David Cameron is pushing a plan to have ISPs filter pornography. Originally, the plan called for an opt out but the ISPs insisted on opt in. Andrews & Arnold, on the other hand, aren’t having any of it. They say that if you want a censored network connection you should move to North Korea or at least seek out another ISP because they aren’t providing any filtering.

That, right there, is enough to get them the Irreal seal of approval but it gets better. They point out that it’s not up to them to censor your Internet connection. That’s something that’s up to individual users to provide for themselves. And by the way, NAT? No they don’t do that either. They think every computer should have it’s own IP address. Now that IPv4 addresses have run out they may be able to deliver only a single IP address to the user who may NAT internally but Andrews & Arnold don’t use it at all. Your IP address remains fixed. If you use IPv6 they provide a /40 block to allocate as you like.

The logging that they do is for network engineering purposes and they make it possible for you to avoid it if you wish. They don’t currently have any monitoring devices on their network and will resist being ordered to install them. The director says that users should feel free to ask him if they have been forced to install them, and says that if he refuses to answer you should draw the appropriate inferences.

All in all, Andrews & Arnold appear to treat their users they way they would want to be treated. Read their policies at the link to see what I mean. It’s a source of sorrow to me that more ISPs (and especially those in the U.S.) don’t do as well.

If you’re looking for ways to make your Internet activities more opaque, here’s a very useful site that discusses alternative software to help you be more secure. It also discusses phone services that may help too.

Most of us, of course, are not terrorists or doing anything illegal but that doesn’t mean we’re fine with having extra-legal snooping into our activities. As someone aptly put it, everyone knows what goes on in the bathroom but that doesn’t mean we want people snooping on us when we’re there.

This site is a great resource and you should bookmark it against the day that you need one or more of the services it discusses. I, for example, am not yet ready to give up iOS and OS X but:

1. I can still use Tor and other utilities to protect my online activities.
2. If, in the future, I do need to give up my current system, this site has good suggestions as to where to go.

Update: use → us

Jamie Zawinski links to a frightening response to a post on Reddit that offered the usual tripe about not caring about government surveillance because “I have nothing to hide.” The responder purports to be living in an Arab country that is “generally assumed to be a dictatorship.” He remarks that the purpose of surveillance is not to control terrorism but to control enemies of the state. That is, those who would destabilize the status quo.

He tells the fable of a young man who idealistically goes to a protest against inhumane farming practices and the consequences that follow. The story is certainly apocryphal but the poster insists that all the things he describes actually happened to friends of his. His final warning is that this is coming to a country near you regardless of how impossible it seems.

Perhaps this is alarmist. Perhaps not. One thing for sure, there is no reason to allow the government to assemble (or perhaps worse, maintain) a surveillance state. As the poster says, if this administration doesn’t use it for evil purposes, a future one will.