Comcast's BitTorrent filtering violating law?

Within the last few weeks, there have been a number of reports by Comcast customers claiming that their BitTorrent downloads and uploads have been capped--or worse, blocked. TorrentFreak recently reported that Comcast, a major U.S. cable company, is using an application from Sandvine to throttle such connections.

BitTorrent traffic accounts for upwards of 25 percent of U.S. Internet traffic, and the techniques used by Comcast are essentially the same as those used by the Great Firewall of China.

Assuming that the SYN packet goes through, the three-way handshake is allowed to happen, then the two hosts will be able to begin communicating.

According to TorrentFreak, Comcast is not doing this. They are instead sending a reset (or RST) packet to the Comcast customer, pretending to be from the host at the end of the BitTorrent connection. It is extremely important to note that when Comcast creates and sends this packet, it does not identify itself as the the source of packet, but instead impersonates one of the parties involved in the BitTorrent connection. This is where things get rather shady.

Many states make it illegal for an individual to impersonate another individual. New York, a state notorious for its aggressive pro-consumer office of the Attorney General, makes it a crime for someone to "[impersonate] another and [do] an act in such assumed character with intent to obtain a benefit or to injure or defraud another."