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.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 12th, 2011 and is filed under Anonymity, Civil liberties, First Amendment, Fourth Amendment, Identification, Security, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.