Did you know - Someone is trying to sanitize suspicious traffic?

"New Software To Balance Privacy and Security?"

On one of my relatively frequent trips through Slashdot, I ran across an article I found interesting, especially given the type of work I do. In this article, it talks about how researchers at UCLA are working on the issue of maintaining the privacy of the individual while the government snoops in on our data, as they seem to be inclined to do more and more.

What it does is read all suspicious online communications and then discard communications from innocent, law-abiding folks like you and Me.

It's funny that it hadn't occured to me before, but when I read the article, the first thing I thought was, "Hey...we can do that!". A BIG-IP with some iRules written to parse the traffic they're talking about could easily sort "innocent" traffic from "criminal" traffic. Writing the iRule would be fun, too, as it has to be some pretty hairy logic while reading through any number of different types of transmission (web pages, emails, chat programs, etc.).

Would every ISP get BIG-IPs to do this kind of filtering? Not too likely.

I suppose if the government had a few BIG-IPs seperated out to handle different segments of traffic, they could have the iRules parsing the traffic inbound (to the Government...outbound from you or your neighbor) and discarding what they shouldn't see. But then, what would stop them from altering those parameters? Interesting conundrum.

More than the creation of the logic in code form, what would truly concern me is who gets to deam traffic innocent or "criminal"? Who decides if my traffic goes to the Feds or not? Just something I found myself musing on that may become more and more relevant as these issues get pressed by the government.

Ok, so I'm a geek for musing about code and logic and the like...but you knew that already, right? ;)

-CW out

Published Jan 27, 2006
Version 1.0

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