[creatonez]

ISPs very frequently do not give a shit about the law. There are so many instances of major ISPs intercepting and modifying traffic, injecting ads, redirecting people to gambling websites, etc. It's not some freak incident involving the NSA targeting you, it happens all the time. All it takes is one bribe.

And what happens if your ISP is compromised without their knowledge? What happens when it's a consumer device such as a router? Don't forget that nearly every TP-Link router has an active malware infection.

It's not just one ISP that you have to trust, it's every single intermediate piece of equipment.

Intercepting traffic is a trivial & common form of compromise, and the problem multiplies by how many different parties you are handing your data to. It is wildly irresponsible to not attempt to protect against this.

[otabdeveloper4]

Nuance is needed here.

"You <-> ISP <-> Bank webpage" is an entirely different security threat model than "You <-> Server you rent from an ISP".

Also, unsanctioned wiretapping is an entirely different criminal offense than stealing leaked credentials.

You can't make blanket statements like that without understanding ISP peering agreements and how data is stored and where.

Let's not pretend like slapping cryptography over L3 is the entirety of being secure. Often (most of the time?) cryptography doesn't even matter much for security.

P.S. Security (prevent stealing sensitive data) and verification (making sure nothing extra is added during transfer) are different problems.

[creatonez]

> "You <-> ISP <-> Bank webpage" is an entirely different security threat model than "You <-> Server you rent from an ISP".

...In what world do people rent servers from consumer ISPs? This used to exist in the 1990s, but is nonexistent now.

If this still exists, it's email-only and has already been outsourced elsewhere. No consumer ISP currently in existence is running these sorts of services on their own hardware.

> Also, unsanctioned wiretapping is an entirely different criminal offense than stealing leaked credentials.

I want to be very clear: There are countries that effectively do not have laws that would ever be adequately enforced on ISPs, either because of corruption, a lack of resources in the courts systems, or both. The use of bribery to compel ISPs into intercepting and recording internet traffic is already rampant at scale. You can't rely on the law to protect you when the internet goes across borders.

> Let's not pretend like slapping cryptography over L3 is the entirety of being secure. Often (most of the time?) cryptography doesn't even matter much for security.

Not sure what your point is. Yes, transport security is not the solution to every problem. But it is by far the lowest hanging fruit, the threat modelling is incredibly clear and obvious. There is a reason transport encryption has become universal across every use case imaginable - it's the literal first step to not getting completely pwned before you've even done anything.

> P.S. Security (prevent stealing sensitive data) and verification (making sure nothing extra is added during transfer) are different problems.

And? On the transport level, they have the same solution: TLS. Confidentiality and integrity work hand-in-hand. It's very rare you will need one without the other.

Unencrypted FTP does not give you either of these, and in fact by being limited to password authentication, it helps turn every passive data collection attack into a persistent remote control attack.