[anonymous]

You can't be serious. There's no civilized country where ISPs are even allowed to look at their users traffic. Observing traffic for suspicious behavior would also be completely over their head from a technical perspective. The only instance where ISPs are taking action by themselves is when network abuse occurs (as in DoS attacks).

[jrabone]

Try again. That is exactly what is happening in the UK with deep packet inspection to "traffic shape" torrents, Phorm to inject targetted adverts, various child-porn filtering systems which route traffic to second-level firewalls based on suspicious IP addresses. See:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleanfeed_(content_blocking_sys...

http://www.thinkbroadband.com/news/4841-bt-given-14-days-to-...

http://www.techweekeurope.co.uk/news/isps-defend-new-porn-fi...

[anonymous]

I'm well aware of these things and none of them has anything to do with ISPs proactively snitching on individual users for the purpose of reporting suspicious activity to law enforcement, which was what my parent and my comment was all about.

(Though I agree that Deep Packet Inspection and Ad Injection may technically be considered a form of "looking at users traffic", albeit an automated one.)

[svachalek]

In the US, the ISPs responsibilities and actions in this regard are considered a state secret.

http://www.aclu.org/blog/national-security/government-confir...