Being a Charter customer (at least for a couple of more weeks) and currently having an issue with horrible packet loss - requiring so far at least six tech visits - I can attest to this. The techs that have been to the house are saying that the hardware at the gateway level is the issue and initially they told me that it was not going to be replaced right now, that I was just going to have to deal with the problem until Charter's "planned" upgrade was rolled out to my area several months from now. (I am not an network engineer but I am assuming this is a switch or router they are talking about). I even had a Charter customer service rep say to me "What are you going to do about waiting? You have no other options", at which point I hung up the phone. That Charter CS rep was right too - we had been told by ATT about a year ago that UVerse was not available at our address. On a whim I contacted ATT, they did some research and told me their database of addresses was outdated and that my address was now eligible for UVerse, and I promptly placed an order. I also told all of my neighbors that they now had a choice as well. I got lucky in that I did have a second option, but I agree that there needs to be more than two ISPs to choose from in any given area, if you are lucky enough to have a choice.

Just another example of the prophecy of 1984. If anyone thinks that this sort of activity will diminish in the future then they are just kidding themselves. It will get worse, much worse. Big Brother wants to know what you are doing, where you are doing it, when you are doing, and even why you are doing it - at all times. As other posters have said - destroy the drive if you ever THINK you might have accidentally downloaded ANYTHING that your respective Government considers illegal. Preferably with acid, although a sledge hammer would do nicely.

I lived in Chattanooga for about 12 years. Somewhere around 1998 or 1999 I visited the exact place you are talking about with a friend of mine (who was then and still is a TVA IT employee). I was just becoming interested in computers at the time and he told me that he would show me where the TVA kept "the brains" of their operation as he put it. Even at that time I questioned whether or not he could get me into this area and his reply was "nobody will know and even if they did nobody will care".

I went back to Chattannoga to visit my old friend a couple of years ago. He had since moved up the govermental ladder and was more or less "in charge" of certain systems. During my visit he took me back to the place, on a Saturday. There was a single security guard on duty at the entrance. As we entered the guard didn't give us much notice as my friend swiped his ID card and entered a key code. I was holding my friend's laptop bag and the guard never asked to look at it or see it. For all he knew I could have been carrying in a brick of explosives. Once inside, I had access to pretty much any place in the "bunker" that I wanted to go, including various control panels, servers, etc.

Short answer, no their security is not better than it was back then.