Corporate ISPs sell whatever customer data they can get and meddle with traffic already, is there a way government can do worse than that? Not even Big Govt just municipal one...
I see little distinction in practice between "I trust my government" and "I trust my corporations", since the advocates for "limited government" in the US favor unlimited corporate power to the extent that corporations effectively own the government and can do what they want. The telco monopolies are exhibit A.
I'd assume that municipal broadband providers still have a privacy policy that would require a court order to turn over data to law enforcement. And that would be the exact same thing binding a corporate broadband provider.
what is it with Americans and the inability to trust or rely on their government? Serious question, why do you automatically assume that every level of government is out to get you?
It goes back to the American Civil War and the opposition of the slave states to the federal government limiting slavery.
You could argue that it goes back to the American Revolution and "no taxation without representation", but to a first order approximation the factions today who are most ideologically anti-government are the successors of the Confederacy.
Have you ever had an interaction with American police? You don't think the city police department will have a dedicated employee in that municipal ISP office that's checking which residents are connecting to TOR nodes?
I don't. I work in municipal government and if anything the firewall is greater here than it is the private sector because we know all the rules. We handle citizen data in all sort of ways and the police don't get automatic access to it just because we share a boss. There are plenty of good reasons to question who handles your data and how in government, but assuming that they are in league with the police is not one of them.
I'm sure it varies wildly by place. You've got places where the rules are taken very seriously and places where the police chief is the mayor and has access to all the national law enforcement DBs with basically no oversight.
Given that policing is rife with various legal and ethical abuses in service of consolidating power and exerting control, it's hard for me to believe that there aren't places where police have deep access to government data on citizens.
You don't think that information would leak if it was happening? There are no national security letters here, no FISA courts, all of this would come out in court.
Gossip alone says there's no way any of that stays secret.
The government has no profit motive to be siphoning your data as you browse (unlike a for-profit ISP), and the NSA isn't running local municipal broadband programs. (If they were, I guarantee you we'd see a lot more federal support for them.)
Asset seizure laws give them ample for-profit mechanisms, and you'd better believe that the municipal police department is going to ask the municipal ISP for a list of citizens connecting to TOR nodes for their no-knock probable-cause raids and seizure.
Which would generally mean they have MORE rules about how they treat your data, all ISPs sell stuff directly to the government that would traditionally need a warrant for.
