"If you download potentially copyrighted software, videos or music, your Internet service provider has been watching, and they're coming for you. Specifically, they're coming for you on Thursday, July 12. That's the date when the nation's largest ISPs will all voluntarily implement a new anti-piracy plan that will engage network operators in the largest digital spying scheme in history, and see some users' bandwidth completely cut off until they sign an agreement saying they will not download copyrighted materials." One day, years from now, historians are going to debate whether this was the point of no return.
I'm not sure what level of invasiveness they'll be allowed to use. It may be "only" monitoring traffic passively. (I say "only" here with great hesitation, can't believe we're living through an age when corporate spying on private communications is legal and acceptable). If it is passive, then encryption will be 100% safe against it.
On the other hand, if they're going to add participating nodes and tamper with packets to perform man in the middle attacks, then unauthenticated P2P encryption is useless since a client cannot know whether it's communicating to a real peer or the ISP's spy proxy. To resolve this, peers would need to authenticate using out of band (non-p2p) mechanisms. Conceivably centralized services could provide that authentication, but then there'd be little stopping the spies themselves from being authenticated.
On the other hand, tor proxies and the like do provide plausible deniability. I do wonder if tor users will have their internet service shut down on account of third party activities? If so, people using tor for perfectly legal private communications might be effectively prohibited keeping their traffic private in the future.
I live in the US,and use Time Warner Cable.Unfortunately, TWC is on the bandwagon.Any information is appreciated.
