Could a modem-router be caught out trying to surreptitiously phone home?

~ Completely paranoid question I know, but it occurred to me that if a ~ wireless modem-router was programmed to store details of people's ~ browsing habits and send these to the manufacturer (perhaps after ~ being leaned on by the NSA, or as part of a deal with a market ~ research agency), since the user has nothing between it and the ~ Internet, as long as it didn't flash it's lights for _these_ pieces of ~ traffic, store them in logfiles etc, there would be no way for them to ~ detect it.

I can't believe that the NSA would be party to any such scheme. But I wouldn't put it past those blighters in MI5 - from what I hear, they're *always* up to no good ...

Cheers,

Aaron

Yep. Totally paranoid.

Yep. That can be done. In fact, it's a feature of some routers that will email the contents of the log file(s) to any address. I think various Netgear routers will do this. They don't collect web sites visited, but that's close enough to your worst nightmare.

If that's insufficient, syslog and SNMP are features of many routers. Syslog will -send- activity (including IP addresses visited) to any syslog server on the internet. I collect this data for some of my customers. SNMP is similar except that the monitoring computer has to poll for the information.

Yes, you're not completely wrong. It can be done fairly easily. No NSA or conspiracy required.

Yep. I do it all the time.

There are others.

As an internet service provider, you would have to be able to provide such information on demand to the any agency that requests it. So yes, its done all the time by law.