Culver City, California, the first Los Angeles municipality to offer the public free WiFi, has now installed a program to filter illegal and problematic content from their network, notes GovTech and Broadband Reports.
The city added Audible Magic’s CopySense Network Appliance to filter illegal and “problematic content” from their network. Three major movie studios call Culver City home.
According to John Richo, Director of Information Technology for Culver City, the city was concerned with taxpayer dollars funding such activity. “This type of content defeats the purpose of the wireless hotspot”.
Culver City is home to nearly 40,000 residents. Their public Wi-Fi system covers ten square blocks in the city’s newly renovated Town Plaza. They used a Firetide Wireless Mesh Network with three HotPoint 1000R outdoor mesh routers mounted atop city and privately owned buildings. It was installed by Wireless Hotspot, Inc. The city’s redevelopment agency spent around $20,000 putting the network together to entice more “foot traffic” to the downtown area with free WiFi access.
Audible’s Copysense device inspects all network traffic looking for legitimate audio or video fingerprints in an effort to weed out copyrighted files based on a master database. The device can also throttle back p2p bandwidth, or prevent p2p altogether. However, notes Broadband Reports, the latest Bit Torrent clients, such as Azureus, can defeat the device since they have incorporated encryption that also helps get around the traffic shaping and copyright filtering.
For NSA-grade surveillence, cities might bring in Booz Allen for a consultation. Applied Signal Technology has voice channel processors and other Wireless Signal Processing gear. With GimmerGlass optical switches, Culver City might contract it out to India.
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