Re:Tor exit node operator gets raided by police
by AnthonyMouse on Tuesday April 05, 2016 @08:29PM
(#11435736)
> The Internet is really complicated, how specifically would you write that warrant without details of the network design?
You've discovered the fundamental problem. You can't. An exit node IP address is completely useless for that purpose because it tells you nothing about where the ultimate endpoint is. The person who actually did it could be in Brazil or Korea or on the International Space Station. You have no actual information on which to base a search.
There is at least a reasonable argument to make that for most residential IP addresses the devices that use the IP address are in the same building as the NAT router. And then you have an obvious solution: You look at the NAT router and then you look at the devices it has given a DHCP lease to, as in most cases there will only be a small number of them which will be in the same building.
But that isn't always the case. The NAT router or one of the devices behind it could be routing traffic for a very large number of machines, e.g. an entire corporation or all of a small ISP's customers or a coffee shop's public wifi. And in those cases the number of different machines controlled by different people is large enough that the IP address no longer identifies anything with enough particularity to justify searching all of the possibilities.
Tor and other open proxies are the extreme far end of that spectrum. It could literally be anyone in the whole world. The IP address tells you nothing at all. And if you know it tells you nothing at all, it provides no justification to search anything in particular.
You've discovered the fundamental problem. You can't. An exit node IP address is completely useless for that purpose because it tells you nothing about where the ultimate endpoint is. The person who actually did it could be in Brazil or Korea or on the International Space Station. You have no actual information on which to base a search.
There is at least a reasonable argument to make that for most residential IP addresses the devices that use the IP address are in the same building as the NAT router. And then you have an obvious solution: You look at the NAT router and then you look at the devices it has given a DHCP lease to, as in most cases there will only be a small number of them which will be in the same building.
But that isn't always the case. The NAT router or one of the devices behind it could be routing traffic for a very large number of machines, e.g. an entire corporation or all of a small ISP's customers or a coffee shop's public wifi. And in those cases the number of different machines controlled by different people is large enough that the IP address no longer identifies anything with enough particularity to justify searching all of the possibilities.
Tor and other open proxies are the extreme far end of that spectrum. It could literally be anyone in the whole world. The IP address tells you nothing at all. And if you know it tells you nothing at all, it provides no justification to search anything in particular.