Wall Street Journal: The Little ISP That Stood Up to the Government
The Wall Street Journal reports on a small Internet Service Provider that is fighting to protect customer privacy:
When Twitter fought a court order for information from the accounts of several WikiLeaks supporters, it was lauded by Wired.com as having “beta-tested a spine.”
The latest entry into the list of companies with a “spine” is tiny Sonic.net Inc., a Santa Rosa, Calif.-based Internet provider with about 36,000 customers. Sonic not only fought a secret court order for information from WikiLeaks supporter Jacob Appelbaum, but also spoke out about it. […]
Sonic was founded in 1994 by Dane Jasper and Scott Doty when they were computer science students at Santa Rosa Junior College. They had been running the campus student e-mail service, and eventually decided to drop out of college to try to build a business offering Internet access accounts for $2 a month, according to the company’s corporate history. […]
In 2008, it became an approved public utility and began offering its own broadband connections. Last year, Sonic began rolling out a new flagship product, Fusion Broadband – which provides speeds of up to 20 megabits as well as unlimited landline phone service. […]
Last year, Google also selected Sonic as a partner for its project to deliver super-high speed network that delivers Internet speeds of 1 gigabit per second – more than 100 times faster than the average U.S. connection.
On Aug. 1, Sonic posted a blog post called “help us protect your privacy online,” which informed users of a new policy that it would retain IP address logs for just two weeks. “Storing logs longer … would potentially make our customers the target of invasions of privacy,” the company wrote on its blog.
Seems like Sonic learned that lesson the hard way.
October 13th, 2011 at 3:43 pm
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