Both already turned the info over to the government. Google is the only one out of the three to even make a feeble attempt to fight the government.  But in a society where people think it's acceptable for our pres to violate the law to spy on Americans, are you really that surprised???? I'm not. Dismayed, sure... not surprised.  And google will at least try to keep our info private!  They're taking it to court instead of just rolling over as yahoo and Microsoft did.

Best,
Tamara

single organism.    Any way you cut it, individualism is going to be stressed.  Knowledge & perogatives - political, technical, etc - is probably the best protection.

As the owner and network admin for a large regional ISP with thousands of customers in the Pacific Northwest, there's some things here I can weigh in on.

From robodude2005's posting:
> The actaul emails, instant messages and websites
> you browsed while on your internet service
> provider are saved and backed up.  If forced by
> the government their contents can easily be
> revealed.

Eh?  In general, ISP's could care less about the contents of your Email.  That would simply be a massive waste of disk space to archive that much data.  Besides, by the stats from our SPAM scanning system, around 95% of all inbound Email is really just SPAM anyway.  The capital investment in archive media and time to manage Email archiving would be high, and all for no logical purpose.

What *is* usually logged is a few mail server messages containing the date/time and from and to addresses of Emails passing through the mail server.  And even that isn't usually kept around for long.  We discard mail server logs after two weeks because even those limited logs take up a huge amount of disk space.  Trying to archive all Emails would require several orders of magnitude more space than that!

ISP's also don't care about your IM messages.  To archive that, we'd have to go out of our way to specially process all the packets for every different IM program out there.  What would be the point?  Time costs money..

Except in the case of ISP's that proxy HTTP connections (transparently or otherwise), and AOL fits into that category, ISP's usually don't track what websites you're visiting.  I say "usually" here because there's a certain percentage of ISP's that do transparent HTTP proxying to a cache server, and the URL's accessed would be logged.

Similarly amusing (but not relevant to what robodude2005 posted), are people that think the government or LE can track down your location automatically based on your IP address and it just shows up on a map.  Well, no.  The closest they can get is to subpoena the ISP, who *might* (or might not, depending how IP allocation is occuring with that ISP) be able to provide info on what customer it might have been.  Same for RIAA in music piracy cases.  TV shows that show LE narrowing down someone to a street address mere seconds after someone hops on the Internet are pretty ridiculous, but people seem to believe just about anything they see on TV.

We hear these concerns all the time from our customers.  They call up tech support and say, "Well, since you're legally required to keep copies of all my Email, and I'm a dumbass and just deleted all my Email, can you give me another copy?"  We've started a contest, "Idiot Customer of the Week", and nominate the best and brightest of our customers based on their tech support questions!  After the MSN/Yahoo/Google subpoena stories hit, a lot of customers started assuming we were recording everything they do, even though we have absolutely nothing to do with web searches.

On some amusing ISP side notes, ISP's stay in business almost solely because of Internet porn.  At one point curiosity got the better of us, so we briefly set up a transparent cache and sorted domain names of websites accessed by our customers to see what was the most popular.  In the top 10 were google.com, msn.com, yahoo.com, and the other 7 were porn-related.  Interestingly enough, Adult Friend Finder ranked 27th, CL ranked 31st, and TER ranked 33rd.

Also of interest, ISP's are aware that a significant number of customers access content that is illegal in the US, but we usually turn a blind eye and ignore it.  In our experience, a whopping 10% of Internet users hit newsgroups containing pictures that are obviously illegal.  Those are the Internet users that should really be worried, as NNTP (Usenet/newsgroup) frequently *is* logged in a readily traceable way..

If that's what turns you on.  Seek help.  Now!

I hear that they're not hard to find.