How Deep Packet Inspection Works

This video provides a nice high-level description of deep packet inspection and its use in Egypt:

A traditional router looks only at the packet header to route the packet. Deep packet inspection looks into the contents of packets, looking for keywords.

Why should you care about deep packet inspection?

If you look back to the 1930s, when telephone service became ubiquitous around the United States, lawmakers realized then that there was this new communications infrastructure and there needed to be consumer protections so that the government and others could not unlawfully and unethically monitor and listen in to private conversations of American citizens. They established laws that prevented that from happening. The government requires a legitimate warrant issued by a judge that lets them do such monitoring. Now we don’t have that.

See also – “an infrastructure of speech control”:

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