British Telecom illegally intercepted and modified web pages, tracked users

Another excellent release yesterday from Wikileaks:

British Telecom Phorm PageSense External Validation report

Excerpts from the summary at Wikileaks:

The internal British Telecom report shows that the carrier committed at least 18,875,324 allegedly illegal acts of interception and modification during its controversial covert "Phorm" trials.

The report also indicates that personal identifying IP addresses were likely used, despite BT previously assuring the public and ICO that no personally identifiable data was used. IP addresses are recognised by the Data Protection Act.

In addition to the 18 million regular advertising injections or hijackings, it appears charity advertisements were hijacked and replaced with Phorm advertisements.

A "cookie" was covertly "dropped" onto 7,000 unsuspecting BT customers computers in collaboration with Phorm (Media121).

The report concludes that the "opt-out" system would not work, since BT customers find themselves opted back in every time they changed computers or wiped their cookies

Intersting how people are reacting to this sort of thing. Here's a web page that pollutes data collection such NebuAD (donating any ad procedes to charity); this Firefox add-on generates fake search queries and click-throughs automatically.

Content modification is the real issue here -- data collection via DPI is one thing, in-stream data modification, changing web pages, etc., as they pass between the sender and receiver, is quite another.

Other ATS threads on Phorm:

"Phorm" Adware to be used by ISP's
Top 3 British broadband Providers selling your information!
BT advert trials were 'illegal'

you know, next we will be told its to help the 'war on terror'
and all those that think the government do spy on law abiding citizens will spout the usual 'got to nothing to hide, why worry' line again
seams to me, its to do the following
1) monitor your web habbits
2) make sure your not looking at anything 'they' think is inappropriate
3) use it to gather any evidence they wish

really starting to see my paranioa is justified

I did a massive posting on this and similar acts of govt spying on our internet habits a few months back at Alex Jones' forum at Prison Planet and it was largely ignored. I don't think anyone even responded and I probably gathered info for a good couple hours, sources and all.. maybe I can find it and repost it here, if anyones interested. Thing about his fans is if he hasn't talked about it first, no one cares...

It's not just Briton either, most all my research pointed to the US govt. doing exactly this right now, among other things.

BT is an arm of the british Intelligence service. Thats why tax payers money goes on the upkeep of all their towers / relay towers / exchanges.

I am not suprised at all actually, and I bet one hell of alot of 'random' people were either Muslims / conspiracy minded folk / EU protesters.

Paranoid ? no i just know how they work.

reply to post by Ian McLean


its only a matter of time until the internet is regulated like television

Originally posted by 1-Cent
It's not just Briton either, most all my research pointed to the US govt. doing exactly this right now, among other things.

And its not just governments, either. Wiretaps for security reasons are one thing, but this newly visible trend is: moneyed interests, via advertisers, directly working with service providers, to dynamically modify internet content to suit their desires. Neither governments, content creators, or consumers are involved.

As a web page travels to your browser, from the content provider (such as ATS), to your browser, it can pass through several networks (via routing). Each of these networks, it seems, now get a crack at modifying the web page 'in flight'. Right now, its advertisments being replaced, but the limits are worrisomely fungible -- I'm sure some manufacturers might like to be able to obscure news articles critical of their products, or automatically insert their own counter-commentary!