The return of the DPI

Ross Anderson writes about how the newly elected ‘coalition’ government in the UK plans to proceed with a controversial plan to mandate the installation of Deep Packet Inspection kits at ISPs in that country. I’ve written about DPI in the past, how it affects our liberty and provides little, to no, advantages for safeguarding national security. A few years ago Hellas was one of the best countries to live in, in terms of privacy; that was more due to the fact that the country has practically little to no governance where it comes to security than due to liberty and privacy respecting government agencies. DPI has been proposed under the pretext of national security and economic purposes (piracy fighting, bandwidth optimisation) and the technology has — for a several years now — allowed relatively cheap devices to be installed to practically all medium-sized or larger ISPs.
I’d like to hope that sanity will prevail, but in a post 9/11 world civil liberties are not exactly a priority.