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My prediction of municipal broadband is that someone down the line is going to submit a FOIA request for their neighbor's internet history and the municipality

by chaps 2y ago

My prediction of municipal broadband is that someone down the line is going to submit a FOIA request for their neighbor's internet history and the municipality will accidentally fulfill the request in violation of the law. Or leak many millions' of peoples' internet history. Let's say, for example, a city hall member is on municipal WiFi on their personal phone while in-session. Instead of going through the difficulty of getting them to hand over their phone to a FOIA officer to search for responsive documents, why not just submit the FOIA to the municipal IT department and get the logs that way? Is there a good reason why this category of concern shouldn't actually be be a concern? edit: yes ISPs sell your data. that's a separate concern outside of this.

jandrese 2y ago
Is this any easier or harder than socially engineering the same logs out of a commercial ISP? Or just buying them outright because the commercial ISP has no legal obligations to keep the customer data private and already sells the data to brokers?
- chaps 2y ago
  It's easier in that it's just an email and will probably be free. It's harder because it couldn't be a targeted attack and would need to rely on the failure of the people handling the request. But failures happen... constantly.
cl0ckt0wer 2y ago
Well, it's not like private companies aren't already selling your data: https://themarkup.org/privacy/2021/09/30/theres-a-multibillion-dollar-market-for-your-phones-location-data https://themarkup.org/privacy/2021/09/30/theres-a-multibilli...
Gormo 2y ago
Yeah, I don't understand the arguments for "municipal broadband", which seems to be a euphemism for giving local governments monopoly control over ISP services. Why would we want political control in lieu of a competitive market and/or community nonprofits?
gruez 2y ago
1. Is this an issue with other records that are subject to FOIA? For instance can people use FOIA to get hold of police reports from rape victims? 2. Why can't the municipal ISPs just... not keep records? I'm not sure why ISPs should be keeping logs of browsing history in the first place.
- chaps 2y ago
  1. Yes, you can. See: https://mchap.io/that-time-the-city-of-seattle-accidentally-gave-me-32m-emails-for-40-dollars4997.html https://mchap.io/that-time-the-city-of-seattle-accidentally-... (I'm the author) 2. You're joking, right?
- kbolino 2y ago
  Records are useful for running operations and debugging issues. You can shorten the retention of them, but eliminating them altogether would significantly degrade the quality of service over long periods of time. However, there is a major misunderstanding about the kinds of records ISPs can keep. They cannot store your browsing data for most major websites, because they don't have it. Widespread use of SSL/TLS along with the rollout of eSNI and DNS over HTTPS means the most interesting details of your browsing are encrypted. "Customer A sent 57 and received 94 packets to/from IP W.X.Y.Z on YYYY-MM-DD" is certainly not full anonymity but it's not hardly the detailed breakdown that "browsing history" implies.
  - chaps 2y ago
    "They cannot store your browsing data for most major websites" That "most" is doing a hell of a lot of work there.
    - kbolino 2y ago
      I don't think it is; I think "major" is doing the work. Damn near all major websites are using TLS now. Support for eSNI is probably a lot lower though (see sibling comment).
      - 2y ago
maximilianburke 2y ago
Freedom of information acts are for shedding light on government acts and activities. What your neighbour is doing is neither, so the request wouldn't be granted. For the city hall member, if you could show that they were doing city business on a city device, you would have a case for why the FOIA request should be granted because that would be a government activity.
- chaps 2y ago
  Yes, that is what FOIA is. I've submitted probably over 3k requests and, well, you're WAY simplifying the extent of the issues and the dynamics of these things. For example -- is your neighbor's email address suddenly public once they email someone within a government agency? Why? Why not? And you're wrong about the city hall member topic. I specifically mentioned "in session" because in many municipalities, the activities they do while in session are responsive to FOIA. That includes their browser history. Regardless of the device they're using.
- Gormo 2y ago
  > Freedom of information acts are for shedding light on government acts and activities. What your neighbour is doing is neither, so the request wouldn't be granted. That's not exactly true. FOIA requirements often make the records of government entities subject to public release, and if a government entity is running an ISP, it's not clear that records that include sensitive information about their customers would necessarily be excluded. Lots of information about housing, land ownership, vehicle ownership, among many other things, is indeed public record, and includes a lot of PII. I just don't understand the fascination with government-run ISPs. If it was economically feasible for a municipal government to run an ISP, why not just organize a community non-profit to do it instead, and avoid all of the pitfalls of mixing politics -- with both its peculiar incentives and unique constraints -- with service provision?
ftth_finland 2y ago
If you really are concerned about this then you should be advocating for open access networks, i.e. separation of physical assets and service provisioning. The municipality owns all the hard assets, such as ducts, pits, poles and fiber optic cables. Private service providers then sell Internet access and other services that on top of that. The municipality cannot leak or hand over information it does not have. Open access is a tried and true concept, easy to implement. However, you should also be working on better local governance, since that is the root cause.

by chaps 2y ago

jandrese 2y ago

Is this any easier or harder than socially engineering the same logs out of a commercial ISP? Or just buying them outright because the commercial ISP has no legal obligations to keep the customer data private and already sells the data to brokers?

chaps 2y ago
It's easier in that it's just an email and will probably be free. It's harder because it couldn't be a targeted attack and would need to rely on the failure of the people handling the request. But failures happen... constantly.

cl0ckt0wer 2y ago

Well, it's not like private companies aren't already selling your data: https://themarkup.org/privacy/2021/09/30/theres-a-multibillion-dollar-market-for-your-phones-location-data https://themarkup.org/privacy/2021/09/30/theres-a-multibilli...

Gormo 2y ago

Yeah, I don't understand the arguments for "municipal broadband", which seems to be a euphemism for giving local governments monopoly control over ISP services. Why would we want political control in lieu of a competitive market and/or community nonprofits?

gruez 2y ago

1. Is this an issue with other records that are subject to FOIA? For instance can people use FOIA to get hold of police reports from rape victims? 2. Why can't the municipal ISPs just... not keep records? I'm not sure why ISPs should be keeping logs of browsing history in the first place.

chaps 2y ago
1. Yes, you can. See: https://mchap.io/that-time-the-city-of-seattle-accidentally-gave-me-32m-emails-for-40-dollars4997.html https://mchap.io/that-time-the-city-of-seattle-accidentally-... (I'm the author) 2. You're joking, right?
kbolino 2y ago
Records are useful for running operations and debugging issues. You can shorten the retention of them, but eliminating them altogether would significantly degrade the quality of service over long periods of time. However, there is a major misunderstanding about the kinds of records ISPs can keep. They cannot store your browsing data for most major websites, because they don't have it. Widespread use of SSL/TLS along with the rollout of eSNI and DNS over HTTPS means the most interesting details of your browsing are encrypted. "Customer A sent 57 and received 94 packets to/from IP W.X.Y.Z on YYYY-MM-DD" is certainly not full anonymity but it's not hardly the detailed breakdown that "browsing history" implies.
- chaps 2y ago
  "They cannot store your browsing data for most major websites" That "most" is doing a hell of a lot of work there.
  - kbolino 2y ago
    I don't think it is; I think "major" is doing the work. Damn near all major websites are using TLS now. Support for eSNI is probably a lot lower though (see sibling comment).
    - 2y ago

maximilianburke 2y ago

Freedom of information acts are for shedding light on government acts and activities. What your neighbour is doing is neither, so the request wouldn't be granted. For the city hall member, if you could show that they were doing city business on a city device, you would have a case for why the FOIA request should be granted because that would be a government activity.

chaps 2y ago
Yes, that is what FOIA is. I've submitted probably over 3k requests and, well, you're WAY simplifying the extent of the issues and the dynamics of these things. For example -- is your neighbor's email address suddenly public once they email someone within a government agency? Why? Why not? And you're wrong about the city hall member topic. I specifically mentioned "in session" because in many municipalities, the activities they do while in session are responsive to FOIA. That includes their browser history. Regardless of the device they're using.
Gormo 2y ago
> Freedom of information acts are for shedding light on government acts and activities. What your neighbour is doing is neither, so the request wouldn't be granted. That's not exactly true. FOIA requirements often make the records of government entities subject to public release, and if a government entity is running an ISP, it's not clear that records that include sensitive information about their customers would necessarily be excluded. Lots of information about housing, land ownership, vehicle ownership, among many other things, is indeed public record, and includes a lot of PII. I just don't understand the fascination with government-run ISPs. If it was economically feasible for a municipal government to run an ISP, why not just organize a community non-profit to do it instead, and avoid all of the pitfalls of mixing politics -- with both its peculiar incentives and unique constraints -- with service provision?

ftth_finland 2y ago

If you really are concerned about this then you should be advocating for open access networks, i.e. separation of physical assets and service provisioning. The municipality owns all the hard assets, such as ducts, pits, poles and fiber optic cables. Private service providers then sell Internet access and other services that on top of that. The municipality cannot leak or hand over information it does not have. Open access is a tried and true concept, easy to implement. However, you should also be working on better local governance, since that is the root cause.