Isn't the internet largely a collection of interconnecting private networks? Apart from a physical wiretap (which is likely to be illegal under the same laws for PSTN etc), the only people that should have means to wiretap/packet-sniff a packet travelling over a private network segment are the network owners and they should have policies limiting who might have access to perform such a task. Regan -----Original Message----- From: Philip D'Ath [mailto:pid(a)ifm.net.nz] Sent: Wednesday, 6 August 2008 1:11 p.m. To: Nathan Ward; nznog Subject: Re: [nznog] Importance of end-to-end IPv4 - research - please help <snip> I would have thought that once your traffic is on the "public" Internet your right to privacy is somewhat diminished. I say "public", because the Internet is clearly not a private network. So I would have guessed that the capture of summary data (packets headers) should be fine. I would also guess that the exact duplication of that data (full packet capture) should also be okay. <snip>