----- Original Message -----
From: "Rob McEwen" <rob@invaluement.com>
When any government entity desires log files from an ISP, and if that ISP is very protective of their customer's privacy and civil liberties, then the ISP typically ONLY complies with the request if there is a proper court order, granted by a judge, after "probable cause" of some kind of crime has been established, where they are not on a fishing expedition. But, in contrast, if the city government owns the network, it seems like a police detective contacting his fellow city employee in the IT department could easily circumvent the civil liberties protections. Moreover, there is an argument that the ISP being stingy with such data causes them to be "heros" to the public, and they gain DESIRED press and attention when they refuse to comply with such requests without a court order. In contrast, the city's IT staff and the police detective BOTH share the SAME boss's boss's boss. The IT guy won't get a pat on the back for making life difficult for the police department. He'll just silently lose his job eventually, or get passed up for a promotion. The motivation will be on him to PLEASE his fellow city employees, possibly at the expense of our civil liberties.
PS - of course, no problems here if the quest to gain information involves a muni network that is only used by city employees.
PPS - then again, maybe my "log file example" doesn't apply to the particular implementation that Jay described? Regardless, it DOES apply to various government implementations of broadband service.
It would, if I were talking about a situation where the muni *was the ISP*, supplying layer 3+ services. I'm not. I'm purposefully only talking about layer 1 service (where the residents contract with an ISP client of the muni, and that client supplies an ONT and takes an optical handoff) or, my preferred approach, a layer 2 service (where the muni supplies the ONT and the ISP client of the muni takes an aggregated Ethernet handoff (probably 10G fiber, possibly trunked). (Actually, my approach if I was building it would be Layer 2 unless the resident wants a Layer 1 connection to {a properly provisioned ISP,some other location of theirs}. Best of both worlds.) Cheers, -- jra -- Jay R. Ashworth Baylink jra@baylink.com Designer The Things I Think RFC 2100 Ashworth & Associates http://baylink.pitas.com 2000 Land Rover DII St Petersburg FL USA #natog +1 727 647 1274