Phorm Outrage Escalates: Protestors To Demand Police Action
By DavidReece • Jun 2nd, 2008 • Category: Internet, News, Technology
A privacy group led by an outspoken Phorm opponent, Alex Hanff, is planning to picket an annual shareholder meeting held by BT, the UKs largest ISP and telecoms company, who have faced fierce opposition to secret trials of Phorms Open Internet Exchange (OIX) program, an invasive scheme that profiles user browsing habits to deliver contextual advertising.
The protest will be held on July 16th, at The Barbican Centre in London to coincide with BT’s 2008 AGM, in an effort to warn investors about the ISPs alleged involvement in illegal wiretapping as part of it’s early opt-out trial, in which customers browsing habits were profiled and sent to Phorm (formerly 121Media), a notorious spyware company.
The group, known as NoDPI (nodpi.org) strongly opposes the use of Deep Packet Inspection by ISPs as a clear invasion of privacy, citing the Regulation of Investigative Powers Act 2000 to make their case, and are also looking at arming themselves with the Computer Misuse Act 1990, and the Fraud Act 2006[pdf], both of which fall under the jurisdiction of the police.
Alex Hanff, founder of NoDPI says…
“At 19:50 this evening I phoned New Scotland Yard to fulfil my civic duty and report a crime. Based on BT’s admission to carrying out secret trials of this technology last summer without obtaining customer consent first, and in accordance to the guidance given by FIPR and the Home Office; I attempted to report BT for multiple criminal breaches of Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (RIPA).
New Scotland Yard refused to issue the complaint a Crime Reference Number as they knew nothing about the issue and were ’sure higher bodies are dealing with this’…”
A downing street petition to “stop ISP’s from breaching customers privacy via advertising technologies” now has over 13,500 signatures showing strong public support despite Phorm advocates in the media trying to dilute the issue.
Phorm has courted controversy ever since it’s inception (then 121Media) by Founder/CEO Kent Ertugrul, when it distributed a piece of advertising software known as PeopleOnPage, which was classified as spyware by F-Secure. PeopleOnPage was built upon an advertising engine known as ContextPlus, which was effectively a malicious root-kit.
Since 121Media became Phorm Inc, the company has continuously hit headlines since 2006 for its practices, most prominently for its proposed trials with major UK ISP’s including BT, Virgin Media, and Talk-Talk. Advertising partners have also dropped out, including The Guardian, once a notable Phorm advocate and OIX adopter, which eventually pulled out of its agreement with Phorm after questions were raised about the legality of the scheme.
Phorm responded to the mounting PR disaster by hijacking Wikipedia, and deleting anything negative about the company history before being caught red handed. The question is; why should we trust a company like this with our private data?
See Also: Phorm is watching you, who’s watching Phorm?
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Who at BT pushed this through without due diligence, where was the cost benefit analysis. If it was Stratis Scleparis then shareholders better be enraged that he has now quit BT and joined Phorm.
Who at BT allowed this to happen?
How can such a high level employee introduce an extremely controversial system, then leave his employer to take the heat while he takes the rewards. Stratis and Phorm must have been laughing long into the night until the public found out what BT were up to.
A criminal conspiracy has been ongoing between BT (British Telecom) and 121Media (Phorm) since 2006 through to the present. They have been spying on private personal information of BT customers (more than 100,000 customers, such as Stephen Mainwaring who reported this matter ot the BT and the media). The person mainly responsible for instigating this criminal act is Stratis Scleparis CTO of BT who jumped ship and joined criminal outfit 121Media (Phorm) as their CTO.
The first known illegal spying on BT customers was back in 2006, when Scleparis overlooked the “Intra-ISP Rootkit” installation, it was known to Scleparis at that time that 121Media(Phorm) was all ready in trouble with their illegal “PC based Rootkit” (Apropos) spying on millions of innocent victims. Scleparis advised 121Media to abandon their illegal PC based rootkit in order that they could concentrate on a more sinister spying project affecting 10’s of millions of potential victims with a rootkit they could never escape or remove, namely the “Intra-ISP rootkit” which would tap every single piece of data that passed through the ISP networks.
Btw 121Media(Phorm) spyware criminal development team is based in Moscow, Russia home of much computer based crime. The malicious code development team based in Moscow, Russia will have complete control over the “Intra-ISP rootkit” technology based in British network facilities, this illegal proprietory technology is off limits to BT’s own technical staff who manage the network, they will just have to passively sit back and hope they are not personally liable for computer misuse and wipetap interception laws.
You can follow all the latest exposure of BT/Phorm criminal activity over on BadPhorm.co.uk website and this will give you links to other websites covering this spying scandal.
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