Quote:
Originally Posted by jelv
Then with your IT knowledge you will know that a TCP/IP packet has a destination IP address - it's not supposed to be diverted along the way without legitimate reason.
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Indeed but the law tends to deal more often than not on tangible concepts rather than minutiae of transmission mechanisms. It’s a contentious point but the majority of experienced lawyers I have talked to regarding Phorm tend to say that for published content then RIPA specifically does not require the consent of the remote (website) party because the communication is that of published content and not of private communications. It is similar to the difference between sending a magazine or video by Royal Mail parcel service against sending a letter by letter post, and I am assured that RIPA applies differently in these two cases.
However as we all know, a lot of web content is interactive, and as another very good and experienced friend explained to me it will be very difficult for an automated process to distinguish between e.g. a Facebook style private messaging thread and published content because of all the bespoke authentication methods out there.
In fact the process of classifying the communication of one that should not be intercepted may require interception so there is a catch-22.
So it seems the only way content owners can fight against intra-ISP spyware/profiling is under copyright legislation and that is doomed to certain failure because Phorm insist that they will respect robots.txt, an established mechanism granting a machine the rights to scan and classify the content.
IANAL (but I know a few very good ones).