RIAA Now Actively Monitoring Usenet Users

Last Updated: Apr 11, 2012

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Copyrights are very valuable, at least according to the MPA and RIAA they are potentially worth billions…and the privacy of individuals amounts to nothing, in their eyes. In order to prove their point ISP’s and the RIAA have partnered and schemed to monitor everything that everyone does online to include your banking, purchases, and especially the Usenet and P2P users. This monitoring will be constant, and will apply to everyone, even if you’ve never been a suspect of piracy.

Who This Affects

All P2P users, like Rapidshare members, Usenet members, no matter the provider, and bit torrent users, will be monitored by the RIAA with the blessings of your local ISP. But, not all ISP’s are on board with the plan. The list participating includes AT&T, Comcast, Cablevision, and Verizon. If you are using one of these ISP’s then you contract will soon contain a clause allowing the RIAA to monitor your connection to help to keep you completely legit.

Protect Yourself Now

The starting date for this program is quite vague. Some are reporting that the plan will go into effect on the 12th of June, while others are saying that July 1st is the start date, and even others are saying that the second quarter of this year sometime. The summer movie season will start off with additional security measures to make sure you are doing things legally.

You do have options at your disposal though, but you will have to do the work. It seems that ISP’s aren’t as concerned with customer privacy as they used to be. The real bad part is that they are allowing a corporate entity, not a law enforcement or judicial agency, do the monitoring. Makes one wonder what kind of information will be kept and maintained.

Keep These Things In Mind

If your ISP provides Usenet access with their service, stop using it. Use a completely neutral provider, like Easynews or Astraweb. The service is almost always better, and more comprehensive. Plus many of the providers give you extras like free VPN service, or online storage.

• Always use SSL if possible. When using SSL your connection is encrypted in both directions, and if it is intercepted the results will not be legible and will be undecipherable.
• Use A VPN service. The most secure way to conduct yourself on the internet is to use a VPN. It encrypts ALL of your traffic, not just Usenet or other specified traffic. This is the only way to insure your entire connection is secured against prying eyes.

Keeping you and your data completely secured and private used to be one of the big selling points for the different ISP’s, even the ones we listed on this article. And if you don’t want someone just assuming you’re a pirate and monitoring everything you do on the internet you need to take action now.Use the methods we outlined here, none of them are hard to implement, if you want to get back the security and privacy that you ISP used to promise you would have.