Charter Watcher

Poisoning Charter’s wiretapping data

Ever since I heard about Charter’s intention to capture my personal browsing habits and sell them to advertising companies, I’ve been looking for ways to protect my privacy against my own ISP. It’s not something any customer should have to do, and it says a lot about both Charter Communications and the elected representatives in the United States that we as customers find ourselves in this position.

Because of the specific manner in which Charter and NebuAD wiretap our connections, there is no way to route traffic around their snooping. We could use proxy servers, but there’s no guarantee that their deep packet inspection process couldn’t derive our intentions even from that. We could use encrypted proxies, but the average speed of a public encrypted proxy defeats the purpose of having broadband access anyway. We could just opt-out, but that’s a complete farce and would only give Adblock Plus new content to shut down. No, there just doesn’t seem to be a good technical way to get around Charter’s illegal monitoring program.

So why not just poison the data?

I’ve written a script which will access a random website, then randomly follow random links from that random website 30 times. It is called by a second script every minute which launches several iterations of the poisoning process, which runs several instances of the poisoning script concurrently. The result is a quick burst of activity which will mask any legitimate traffic my wife or I put on Charter’s system. Since NebuAD has no way of distinguishing the requests apart, the categorical interests which Charter and NebuAD assign to our household, and thus our advertising stream, will be completely useless to anyone.

It’s a shame that my only defense to being monitored by a private company in violation of several federal laws is to build a Linux workstation and script a custom solution. But that’s how it is, and until we either convince Charter to end their illegal wiretapping program or put them out of business, my Linux machine will visit thirty one web pages five times every minute.

That’s 155 pages per minute. 9,300 pages per hour. Over 220,000 pages per day.

You can download the poisoning script for yourself here. Feel free to modify and redistribute. If you find a way to significantly improve upon it, please send me a copy so that I can make it available.