Charter Watcher

Charter starts to feel the heat

An article in the East Oregonian discusses Charter’s plans to begin wiretapping its customers, and explains why Charter has yet to flip the on switch just yet. After posting up several articles where Charter vice president Ted Schremp contradicts himself in explaining the technology, and further learning that NebuAD’s hardware doesn’t even function according to their own patents, I somehow believed that they weren’t starting yet due to sheer incompetence. Apparently they’ve gotten past the fact that they themselves have no clue how the technology works and can’t coherently explain it to the public though. Their holdup isn’t technical though, you see; it’s legal.

From the article:

Charter’s proposal, however, caught the attention of two U.S. House members. Massachusetts Democrat Rep. Edward J. Markey and Texas Republican Rep. Joe Barton sent a letter expressing serious concerns about the plan to Charter President and Chief Executive Officer Neil Smit.

Markey is the chairman of the House Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet and Barton is a ranking member on the House Committee on Energy and Commerce.

The lawmakers told Smit Charter’s plan to collect information about its customers’ Web-related habits without their prior consent “raises substantial questions related to Section 631″ of the federal Communications Act.

Charter spokeswoman Anita Lamont said Smit and the two lawmakers and their staff held a “low key” meeting this week. She said Charter hasn’t decided anything for certain and hasn’t moved forward with its plan to pilot the program this month.

I like the idea of a “low key” meeting which halts the progress of completely illegal and anti-customer programs. Congressional hearings are coming up very soon, and I expect to hear some of the things Markey and Barton said behind closed doors aired in public.

A few of the things Congress needs to address are:

• Why doesn’t this program require an opt-in as opposed to an opt-out?
• If the law requires all “enhancements” which collect data to benefit the customer, do Charter’s outright lies about this program being beneficial fall under illegal and/or misleading statements?
• What about the “chilling effect” with this program? If a person who knows they’re being monitored does not feel comfortable alerting their psychiatrist on a tapped telephone or Internet connection and later goes on to kill twenty people, does the company which instituted the monitoring bear some liability?
• Charter and NebuAD have been using very different language in explaining this program in several different ways. Congress needs to get clearly-understandable technical documentation on this program in the hands of the public.
• What is NebuAD’s legal responsibility with data purchased from Charter? They’ve expressed intent to sell it to other companies, for instance. Can they really do that?
• What are the legal ramifications for Charter if and when this data is made available to the public? We all know it’s only a matter of time before anyone who wants it will have access to several gigs of Charter customer click stream. What happens then?
• Does this program have any future intentions, such as detecting copyright infringement or supplying warrantless data on civilians to the U.S. Government?

The good news is that Charter’s program has been halted, presumably by the efforts of Markey and Barton. I’m sure they’ll send a couple of slick executives with trunks loaded with stacks of cash to ensure that Congress sees things their way. Maybe we’ll get lucky though, and Charter will suffer a setback that isn’t predicated on their being run by the best team of retarded monkeys ever to run a communications company into the ground.