----- Original Message ----- > From: "Rob McEwen" <r...@invaluement.com>
> When any government entity desires log files from an ISP, and if that > ISP is very protective of their customer's privacy and civil liberties, > then the ISP typically ONLY complies with the request if there is a > proper court order, granted by a judge, after "probable cause" of some > kind of crime has been established, where they are not on a fishing > expedition. But, in contrast, if the city government owns the network, > it seems like a police detective contacting his fellow city employee > in the IT department could easily circumvent the civil liberties > protections. Moreover, there is an argument that the ISP being stingy > with such data causes them to be "heros" to the public, and they gain > DESIRED press and attention when they refuse to comply with such > requests without a court order. In contrast, the city's IT staff and > the police detective BOTH share the SAME boss's boss's boss. The IT guy > won't get a pat on the back for making life difficult for the police > department. He'll just silently lose his job eventually, or get passed > up for a promotion. The motivation will be on him to PLEASE his fellow > city employees, possibly at the expense of our civil liberties. > > PS - of course, no problems here if the quest to gain information > involves a muni network that is only used by city employees. > > PPS - then again, maybe my "log file example" doesn't apply to the > particular implementation that Jay described? Regardless, it DOES > apply to various government implementations of broadband service. It would, if I were talking about a situation where the muni *was the ISP*, supplying layer 3+ services. I'm not. I'm purposefully only talking about layer 1 service (where the residents contract with an ISP client of the muni, and that client supplies an ONT and takes an optical handoff) or, my preferred approach, a layer 2 service (where the muni supplies the ONT and the ISP client of the muni takes an aggregated Ethernet handoff (probably 10G fiber, possibly trunked). (Actually, my approach if I was building it would be Layer 2 unless the resident wants a Layer 1 connection to {a properly provisioned ISP,some other location of theirs}. Best of both worlds.) Cheers, -- jra -- Jay R. Ashworth Baylink j...@baylink.com Designer The Things I Think RFC 2100 Ashworth & Associates http://baylink.pitas.com 2000 Land Rover DII St Petersburg FL USA #natog +1 727 647 1274