Ask HN: Legal barriers to starting an anonymous ISP?

3 points·blintson··4 comments

Anybody know of any case where there was an ISP that was by design not capable of identifying its' customers? Are there any laws specifically against charging for anonymous wireless access?

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If you're thinking of operating in the USA, you should read up on Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement (CALEA). CALEA pretty much requires that you be able to associate a name with any IP on your network, so you're going to have a hard time operating as an ISP without any personally-identifying information about your customers.

Regardless, if you can figure out a way to anonymously collect payment for services online without either getting ripped off by your own customers or leaving a paper trail for law enforcement to subpoena, then you have a far more valuable commodity than simple bandwidth to offer. In fact, you would have invented "digital cash", and any number of folks (afore-mentioned law enforcement and tax agencies amongst them) will race each other to control or use it.

Wouldn't touch online payments. I was thinking you take cash at a store front and get a randomly generated key that gives you bandwidth for a certain time.

Surely, law enforcement would find an excuse (quite possibly even a legitimate one) to put said store front under surveillance.

I'm sure that as soon as something bad or illegal starts occurring on that isp like say child pornography or even something like anonymous bomb threats someone is going to have to be held accountable and if you can't point people in the right direction it might end up on you.

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