Is your ISP sniffing packets?

smells like chips and fresca. Well then, um, I think that was because we were going to talk about I sp S sniffing packets. Let's say alright then, um, for the uninitiated, a packet is a little piece of information, a little piece of digital information in specific, and it's um. It's essentially how the Internet gets information from one place to another, breaks it down into little chunks, sort of

like you might freeze Charleston chew and whacket on the table. Um, These little packets of information are going from server to server to get from your computer to somewhere else. Why are you looking at because I was thinking of Mike TV from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory that's a better analogy. Tiny tiny bits, sends it through the air, and then it gets magically put back together on the other side. It's not magic. I'm just joking about that obviously. Um.

And you don't have to stretch it out at the end. No, But every packet has essentially three three different sections. You have a header, and then the header is sort of the information about the packet itself, like where it fits within the grand scheme of the information um, the origin from the origin computer and the destination computer. You know, it's kind of like all the the administrative stuff you need in order to send information from one place to another.

Then you have the payload. The payload is the part of the packet that actually holds the information you want to send. So let's say an email, that would be the part that would hold part of that email. And then the footer, which essentially tells the computer, hey, this is the end of the packet. Um. So you send enough of these packets together, it's like putting a puzzle together.

You get all these different headers and that tells you where everything belongs, and the computer puts it all together and then you get the email on the other side. Yep, and Uh. The thing is, there have been rumors, some of them quite substantial, um, that your internet service provider, or at least some Internet service providers, are sniffing packets now sniffing in this case, they're not actually you know, walking up to the computer and inhaling sharply like like

Chris and I are. Um. They what they're doing is they're they're using special software to look at the information that is inside these packets and uh, and it can also put this stuff together so I can figure out what it is that's going across the networks. Now, if you're an Internet service provider, you can essentially see everything

that's going across your network. I mean you you have that capability of see, of of looking in and saying at any particular time and saying, okay, what's going across right now? And you can see where the traffic is heaviest. And you know, there there's some legitimate reasons for doing this. It's not all you know, cloak and dagger espionage. Someone's spying on my information kind of stuff. But the problem is there also is this cloak and dagger element that

goes along with it. And that's where objections are are popping up all over the place. That's true. Um, you know, from the I s P S point of view, Uh, the I s P ight want to do some uh you know, packet sniffing to ensure that they're not their network isn't being misused. Um. You know, you might have, for example, someone downloading a movie via bit torrent. Okay,

take away the legal aspects of it. If you have somebody who's downloading a bunch of movies via bit torrent, that person is using a whole lot of bandwidth, and if your bandwidth is split up among say we'll make it will pretend it's a small I s P thirty customers and one person is taking up the majority of the band with You might be kind of concerned, especially if your other customers start calling in and going, hey, I just don't I don't know, I'm not getting any throughput.

The latency is terrible. What's going on with this? You might say, well, you know what, I have an idea what might be going on with this? You might say, look, you know, Charlie, you're gonna have to stop downloading all these movies. UM. Now that's where the legal stuff starts getting in, because you know, the r I a A, the Recording Industry Association of America, and the Motion Picture Association of America. Yes, they have a different interest in

wanting to know who's downloading what and when. Yeah, chances are if you're listening to this podcast, you at least have some knowledge about what we're talking about here, because it's not like the r I A and the m b a A have been particularly secretive about this. Um. They might have even sued you. Example, you may very well have been one of the people they sued. Um. They're they're quite serious about stopping piracy as any way

they can, including all the wrong ones. Um. And and you know, I say that kind of lightly, but it really is true. They tend to use a club to to attack a nap um. There's even debate among a lot of people. I'm sure pirates are among them. Uh that you know, the the quote unquote damage being done by this piracy issue is so minuscule in comparison to the uh the retribution meet it out by these groups

that it's absolutely ridiculous. I'm not gonna throw my hat into that ring because that's just a that's that's too thorny even for me. Yeah, I'm stunned. Well, maybe it'll be a blog post in the future. But the the important thing here is that these organizations have a lot of clout. I mean, first of all, they have tons and tons of money, and they are representing the recording industry and the movie industry, right, and uh, they have a lot of Uh. When I say cloud, i'm talking

political cloud. They can they're very influential. I mean, these are huge industries, and uh, there are a lot of politicians who listened to them, and they're very highly paid lobbyists. So yeah, they're paid to talk to politicians, or they're paying people to talk to politicians on their behalf. At any rate, what's happening here is that you've got politicians who here, hey, we need to stop this. It's it's

ruining our industry. We can't control it. And uh, and so they start looking for ways to stop piracy that could affect you, even if you're not, um misbehaving at all. Yeah, it's funny that you would say that, because I actually have an example of something that that was just in the news about that UM and it wasn't in in the mainstream media, or at least not a lot of it.

So I actually have an article from the Guardian, um in which they were saying that California and Democratic Senator Diane Feinstein was having language added to the stimulus package that was just passed not too long ago. Um. And essentially it was theoretically it was supposed to add uh packets sniffing properties to the language. And you might say, well, what's going on with that? Well, the idea was, Um, it was it was for the Broadband Technology Opportunities Program.

It's six to nine billion uh dollar part of the stimulus package, and it was originally aimed to build out broadband networks in less served areas well. She wanted to add language that would allow them to sniff packets or would force I sp s T sniff packets for child pornography and copyright infringement. Um. And uh, you know this, this was in the Guardian and apparently, UM, when I did a little bit of follow up research on it,

it doesn't appear to have actually made it in. Uh. They were attempting to add it in, but it didn't actually go in pretty sneak way past it. But the thing, well, the thing is, you know some people were saying that the m P a a had uh. Senator fine Stein's here. Of course, I have no way of knowing that for certain um, but you know, it does go with what you were saying a moment ago about how um you

know they have so much political cloud. Well, you know, she has a California senator, and those industries are very very strong in California. So um, and it's conceivable that they may have been suggesting to her that that this language was added into the bill. However, it didn't seem to make it into the law. And Chris mentioned earlier the whole thing about Torrance. Torrent is not necessarily illegal um to a method of peer to peer sharing, and

it's there's nothing illegal about sharing files especially. I mean, if you've got the right to share those, then that's perfectly fine. There's nothing stopping you if it's all you know, if it's all in public domain or shareware, or if it's yours and you don't mind, that's cool. Yeah, I mean, this is a This is one of those things where it's not the technology that's illegal. The technology is perfectly fine to to use to break down the information and send it. As a matter of fact, it's very much

like the Internet packet sharing. I mean it breaks a file into pieces and distributes them. Um. But yeah, it has nothing to do with what people are using technology for exactly. Just like people can use the web to do, you know, to look at illicit material. That doesn't mean that's what the web is for. You know, it's it's possible. Just like someone could use a I don't know, a highway to make a fast getaway from a bank robbery.

That doesn't mean that's what the highways for. So of course you're getting it getting now we're getting into the area where I do throw my hat into the ring. But so here's the question. If if I s p s are forced or at least highly encouraged to sniff packets, how can you tell? Um, Well, there are a couple of different ways. There's some software out there that you can run that at least lets you see kind of what your I SP is up to. Some of it's from our good friends over at a Google. Really yeah,

actually it's sort of a kind of a partnership with Google. Um. There's a group called Measurement Lab, and Measurement Lab has several different programs you can download for free to kind of see what's going on on your Internet service provider. One of them is called gloss nost Um, and gloss nost is a tool that tells you if bit torrent traffic is being blocked by your I s P a bit torrent traffic. Yeah, why would why would bit torrent traffic be blocked by your I s P? I mean

if you're using I don't know, Comcast for example. Oh yeah, that was a good, good segue there. So Comcast got a huge got egg on its face corporate face, uh, quite a bit in the corporate egg over the last couple of years because they the company argued very strenuously that it was not blocking any traffic um or anything

based upon the kind of traffic it was. So they were being accused of throttling, which means they're controlling how much information can go through throttling a bit torrent traffic. And they said no, no, we're not doing that. And then it turned out yes, they were in fact doing that and inserting fake packets into streams to disrupt disrupt traffic entirely. Right, So um, this was the FCC said this was a bad thing and that it violated net neutrality and that Comcast was in violation of it and

needed to be fined. Comcast came back and said, you know what, what gives you f c C the right to do this? And the FCC said, we'll get back to you on that, because, as it turns out, it's not against the law. No one really has the authority. I mean, the Internet is a global thing. It grew very organ anically, and we're getting to the point now where it's grown faster than our way, our means of administering it, and and and you know, being able to

meet out justice or or detect injustice. I mean, who's to say what's right and wrong? There's no ultimate authority. You can go to the loan Internet ranger, right, I guess we could all go to Tim berners Lee. Of course that's the Web, that's not the Internet. M vent surf. Wait, he's with Google. I think he would just say it all it's all fair. Well, in which case, let's go

for it. Well, you know that goes back. Comcast is basically saying, look, you know, people are using our network, and we want to make sure that network resources are used fairly and everybody has a chance to you know, simpath the well of bandwidth, um you know. So that's been their argument, I think is saying, look, you know, we're just trying to make sure that our services are okay for everybody to use. It's just that, uh, you know,

some people use a whole lot. And the problem is that there there are a lot of people who say, you know what, there's no evidence that this BitTorrent use is affecting the bandwidth of your network at all. Um, as far as we can tell, you're only doing it because it happens to be a bit torrent. You're not doing it for other kinds of content. So um, and the measurement lab tool only works for this this particular one. They there are others that are supposed to come out soon.

They are not out now. Um. But uh yeah, like uh def probe is supposed to determine if your I s P is shuffling around certain kinds of traffic onto a slower pipe, so you would be able to see if your I s P says, you know what, this is not as important to us as this is. Let's uh, you know what, Jimmy's just gonna have to wait an extra hour for that movie to download because Billy over here he needs to access our content. So let's put him on the fast track and let's put Jimmy on

the slow track. Well, you're not supposed to do that, not at least according to the philosophy of net neutrality. UM, everyone's supposed to kind of a level playing field. So this would let you tell see if your SP was actually messing around with you. So for example, and I'm not saying that they're doing this, I'm just thinking of them again because I happen to know they have this service.

For example, Comcast has a service that's very much like Hulu's where you can download video content, watch shows live or not live, but you know, streaming on the internet. So for example, you might have you know, Steve trying to watch a movie on Comcast service, and you know

Jenny watching something on Hulu. They could slow down and inhibit Jenny's traffic to give Steve's traffic priority because he's using their service and they want their service to look good or even not that they have been accused of that, I'm just saying that's an example of how an I SP might do that. They might even do it just so that they can convince Jenny that she really needs to switch to Comcast instead of using Hulu entirely, again

goes against the philosophy in that neutrality. UM. So yeah, this is a this is a complicated issue. Now our I SP sniffing packets probably without running this software, it's impossible for me to say that if they're sniffing your packets are not. But um, there's a good chance. So there's nothing stopping them because I mean the FCC is like the FCC complaint was all about throttling, right, not about packet sniffing. UM. So you know, uh, for the answer of your question, is my I s P sniff

sniffing my packets? Uh? Probably? Yeah, that said, think about all the people on your I s P. If you use a um, a very large I s P. Especially, UM, you know, they're not gonna sit there and go through everybody's traffic because they honestly don't have time to UM and you know, especially in this economic climate, they don't have enough money to pay all the people it would take to read every packet. Yeah, they're they're not. They're not looking at your emails necessarily to see what you're

sending to your high school crush or whatever. Um, they're really looking for massive amounts of traffic and then wondering what they should do about it without getting caught by the FCC. No wait, I mean finding ways of making sure they're bannedwidth usage stays nice and end level. You know, this isn't the first time people have been talking about packet sniffing. This has been available for years and years, and even in the early two thousand's, the FBI had

this UM, this implementation they wanted to run. We even have an article about it UM called Carnivore gipes and UM. Yeah. Anyway, Carnivore was this thing that was essentially a piece of hardware that they wanted to install at I s p S and UM. It would it would intercept messages and uh you know, split them apart, look at the content on one side, to look at general statistics on the other, and basically they would be able to get a lot of information about you and and about the traffic you

were sending in. I think it was it was seen as a national security initiative. However, Uh, the title of our article here at how stuff works is how Carnivore worked. So it is not something that is in UM implementation now. But the packet sniffing technology has been around for you know, many years now, so that's certainly not a new issue. Um. So, well that's good. That was a good discussion about packet sniff you anything else to add to that. No, well,

you know what that means. It's time for listener mail. Oh my, okay, so today's listening mail. My name is John Allen is Sorry, I'm totally mispronounced your last name, John from Texas, and I think you should talk about the ongoing trial of the Pirate Day. I've been reading up on it and find it to be really interesting how the movie industry is behaving. So what John's referring

to kind of segways. You know, it works nicely with the packets sniffing, does you think I think it's very funny that you have that you choose that particular emails to read on this particular podcast. Dolly, let's just say that isn't chance Grant. So. Pirate Bay is one of those torrent tracking services we were kind of talking about before.

Now here's the important thing to keep in mind. Pirate Bay does not host files, right, It provides a tracking service for torrans, So it's kind of like a search engine. Specifically for Torrance. So say you want to find a copy of a public domain UM program that's out there somewhere, and you go on pirate Bay and you search for it, and you find that there are copies out there by

other pirate Bay users. You could download the torrent that way, and you would actually download bits and pieces from all these different users until you had your own copy, And if you chose, you could also participate so that other users who would search for this file in the future could also get hold of it. Or you could use it to download movies and music that are copy under copyright and you're violating the law and your a dirty, dirty pirate. But except those are the dirty, dirty pirates

who are not being prosecuted right now. That's exactly right. The users aren't the ones being prosecuted. It's the pirate bay itself. Now. Pirate Base servers are all in Sweden. And it turns out the United States government pressured the Swedish government quite a bit to UM to go after the pirate Bay and prosecute them, and uh. Eventually the Swedish government capitulated and they brought a case against pirate bay UM. There were two different major kinds of charges.

There was the let's see, was it assisting copyright infringement charges? And uh, let's see, the other one was assisting making available copyrighted material, as seems kind of you know, weird and and and vague, but that's the way it's worded. So here's the thing. The prosecution did not understand how the pirate Bay worked. And the day after the Pirate Bay, uh lawyer opened with the opening statement, half the charges

were dropped. Well, yeah, all the charges that had to do specifically with assisting copyright infringement were dropped because it just wasn't. They weren't making available any of these files. They were just a tracking system. There's a lot of attention being put on this right now because people are you know, kind of falling into one camp or the other. Either come on, they're called the pirate Bay, what do you expect? Or they're saying, no, the pirate Bay is

really just a search engine. If you go after the Pirate Bay, you should go after Google because you can find torrents on Google. You can use Google to find torrents. You can use any search engine really to find these sort of torrent files. It's just the pirate base specifically

tuned to find torrents. Then there's the revenue aspect, you know, they're they're claiming that not only did they build the site to to show people where you can download files illegally, but they sold ads alongside it, and the the prosecution is trying to get money back for for the revenue that they made on the on the advertising, about a hundred and eighty thousand dollars. I'm told, yeah, and again, this is like search advertising. You could argue, I mean

it's not. It's not that they're necessarily advertising these you know, various movies and music as much as they're advertising these search tool itself. Right, So I mean you're it's tricky, and um, it's it's the other interesting thing is that the prosecutions finding it very difficult to go after specific people in the Pirate Bay because they don't have a

traditional hierarchy. There's not like one guy in charge. It's a group of people who all pitch in and do work, and when they say, you know what, we could use this feature, someone will go out and build it. It's not like, uh, the leader says, hey we need this, you go do it. It's it's very much collective, and the prosecutions finding it difficult to handle that aspect of the Pirate Bay too. It's actually becoming sort of a

a circus over there in a way. And uh, as we're recording this, they trial still ongoing, so we don't know how it's going to turn out just yet. And would explain why they were all wearing the big floppy shoes. I was wondering about that. It's going to ask you. I was just wondering why the defense all came in

one car. That is a good question. So anyway, now that we've managed to get completely off track, to get back on track, if you would like to learn more about packet sniffing and torrents and all of the information in between, we have all that at our website, how stuff works dot com. And if you want to get in touch with us you have any corrections or do you have any comments or suggestions for for episodes, you can write to us at tech stuff at how stuff

works dot com. And don't forget we have blogs now blogs ya blogs, so you can read all about Chris's take on the tech world and my stupid jokes. Those can be found at blogs dot how stuff works dot Com slash category, slash text. So I hope you find all that interesting. It's fantastic stuff. There's tons of content there, and we look forward to talking to you again really soon for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it How Stuff Works dot Com brought to you

by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready, are you