Invasion of Privacy from ISP
 

My ISP is actively monitoring its customer's activities. Specifically, uploads and downloads.
I am on a wireless router connected to a cable modem. The modem belongs to the ISP, the router is mine.
Currently, I am wired from the router to my LAN however, as you might guess, I am broadcasting a wireless connection (that I have recently secured).

I received a letter from my ISP accusing me of downloading copyrighted material. While this is not true there seems to be no way that I can convince them of it. I suspect that someone in my neighbourhood has piggy-backed my wireless connection and was using it to connect to the Internet.
My question is this: Is there any way that I can monitor the activity that is going through my router (a CISCO Linksys) and is there a way that I can keep my ISP out of my business?
My OS is Linux Mint 10.
Any advise would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you in advance

Your ISP receives complaints from the owners from the copyright products.
They monitor the ptp filesharing, and will give the IP to your ISP, who will warn you.
So no, you can't keep your ISP out of your buisiness, and no, this is no
"Invasion of Privacy from ISP"

Kind regards

I think this is more a question of how have you secured your wireless? If you suspect someone in your neighborhood of using your LAN, shouldn't you take some steps to keep them out? If you'll detail how your wireless is (or is not) encrypted we can offer some advice.

The onyl way really is to go through a proxy server but at the end of the day, if what you are doing is bad enough they will trace you whatever you use!

+1 from me.

Patriot2135, your priority needs to be putting a stop to the unauthorized access ASAP. Some might say that you're lucky to have only had an intruder interested in downloading pirated material. It could have been much, much worse (and still can be if you don't tighten things up). It sounds like you were either providing unrestricted access; using WEP; or using WPA/2 with a weak passphrase. In either case, switching to WPA2 with AES and a strong passphrase is highly recommended, while other less important measures such as MAC filtering should also be considered.

As for keeping your ISP out of your business, what kind of business are we talking about here? For example, I don't like my ISP being able to read my email, so I need to make sure I use SSL (HTTPS) whenever connecting to my Web-based email service. If you want to create a secure tunnel from your home network to a location beyond your ISP in order to keep them in the dark completely, there's many VPN service providers out there. Of course, if you've still got intruders in your home network, you'll likely be getting a letter from your VPN service provider too.

ISP monitoring customer traffic?
 

First let me say thank you all for responding so quickly.
I am new to this and I am still learning what it is to connect to the Internet through a wireless connection.
To address the question about the way that I am securing my wireless router.....before this incident I wasn't even aware that I needed to secure it.
I have since learned that by entering the IP address of the router into a browser I can manage and control how the router works. As I said, I am very new to all of this.

win32sux-To respond to your question, I am using WEP to secure the connection but until recently I did not include a passphrase at all. So, yes I was providing unsecured access and it sounds to me like I got real damn lucky. Since this incident I have read the owner's manual that came with the router, and while I don't understand everything about how to set up and secure my connection, at least I have created a pretty strong passphrase. Hopefully that will at least protect my LAN until I can learn more about how this wireless router thing works.
To address the question about what kind of business I am referring to, you addressed it. I don't like the idea of my ISP being able to read my email either. As far a what I download/upload, I don't really care. I don't have anything to hide there. They can monitor that all they want.
To be honest, I don't remember anything in the contract that I signed that said that I acknowledge that my ISP has the right to actively monitor my online activity. If in fact that is what is going on here?
Any help or advise that you can provide would be GREATLY appreciated.
I am sorry if I appear ignorant or naive. I'm afraid maybe I am in this regard.
Thank you again for your help.

One thing to realize is that WEP is almost as bad as having no encryption at all. There are tools widely available on the internet that are capable of cracking WEP encryption in a matter of minutes and those tools are so easy to use, anyone can do it. USing WEP is the equivalent of putting a "No Tresspassing" sign on your front door but leaving it unlocked. WEP establishes your intent to keep your network private but isn't any sort of an obstacle to access.

As win32sux suggested, you should switch immediately to WPA2/AES encryption and use a strong passphrase. You're looking for something that won't be found in a dictionary, and the longer the better. Mix in random letters, capitalization and numbers.

This is a great first step, but if you are still using WEP, it is futile. The problem with WEP is a flawed algorithm, and because of this ANY passphrase is easily broken in WEP. Moving to WPA is critical. Please feel free to ask questions about your router, just be sure to tell us what it is. By the way, I would also change the administrator username and password on the router.

then difference between WEP and no security at all is huge, 99% of the people don't know how to hack WEP. And hacking a wep accesspoint is usually illegal while connecting to an open accesspoint isn't(just blame your computer for connecting to it) But still, don't use wep cause if you know how to do it it will only cost you a few minutes to hack it.
if you don't want your isp to see what you're doing only download trough encrypted protocols (https/ssh/sftp/encrypted torrent connections+private trackers) this is not something that is easy to do but it's the way to keep your isp out of the contents of your traffic. ( http://torrentfreak.com/how-to-encry...rrent-traffic/ ) I'm a fan of privacy, lots of people don't know what is monitored by police/isp! but don't use it to do anything illegal with. encrypting all traffic isn't really possible, cause that would mean that the other party needs to be able to decrypt the connection. What you CAN do, (theoretically, probably not what you want) is to rent a server in a country you trust in not monitoring your internet connection and set up a vpn tunnel in a vpn enabeled router and route ALL your internet traffic trough there.

Thanks for the information Hangdog2.
After reading through the posts to my original query I logged into my router again and went through the security settings.
The following are my current security settings as it pertains to the WEP/WPA2 etc.:
Wi-Fi Protected Setup Status: Configured
Network Name (SSID): ***********************
Security: WPA2 Personal
Encryption: TKIP or AES
Passphrase: ****************************
Asterisk's replace "Eyes Only" data. (for obvious reasons)
I have discovered that if I attempt to configure any security protocols beyond the above I loose my connection to the Internet. I am convinced that it is due to my ignorance regarding the correct security setup of the router. I just don't know what I am doing.
Thank you all again.
Your help is definitely appreciated.

Are you doing this via the wireless network? This sort of thing should be done through the wired one. Otherwise, you're transmitting the new passphrase via the allegedly-penetrated network where it can be easily sniffed and you're back to square one. Also, you'd need to re-associate whenever you change the security protocol, passphrase, etc. Your loss of connectivity is probably due to that, given that none of those settings are related to the Internet side.