The EFF's problem is when IP information, as with an anonymous phone call, is used to spur action without enough additional evidence. This is the anecdote they cite in their whitepaper:
http://fusion.net/story/287592/internet-mapping-glitch-kansa...
edit: I responded to someone who clearly pointed out that I misunderstood raynier's argument. The comment was deleted by the time I hit Reply, but here is my reply:
I now agree that I'm at fault for short-shrifting raynier's argument. The whitepaper also includes up on top a story of a place being raided for being a Tor node, which may feel similar to the vagueness of justification that comes from a anonymous phone call, but that's not completely analogous either.
Perhaps the closer analogy would have been SWATting, but I don't think law enforcement supports that as a practice (because it's a result of them getting actively deceived). But I feel that's part of the EFF's overall point: SWATting is clearly a bad thing, whereas the specious reasoning the police sometimes uses to justify a raid based on IP information is not scrutinized enough, because of general tech ignorance.
Shouldn't it depend on the action? An IP address alone would not justify going to the location it was assigned to and arresting, charging, and holding in jail until trial the person(s) found there.
However, if the action is just to get a search warrant to search that location for more evidence, that seems OK to me. With nothing else other than that the IP address was used for some criminal activity, that is pretty good evidence that something related to the crime took place at the location the IP address was assigned to at the time.
If you've been following some of the recent stupidity police have opted repeatedly to just use some sort of resource to correlate ip address to physical location. This could be because this provides instant gratification or because they lack enough evidence as of yet to even justify THAT warrant.
As an example one such resource used to list a single coord for all unknown addresses in the US. This led to parties at that address dealing with hundreds of cases of unpleasant police contact wherein each officer individually learned that this address wasn't the center for criminality on planet earth. Unfortunately this knowledge didn't percolate upward.
So we aren't dealing with just proxies, tor exit nodes, open networks, many users connecting to the same router and other relatively complex matter. We are dealing with the fact that the police can't even be bothered to confirm with the ISP which customer even had that address at a given time.
In that context, without an initial warrant to gather the most basic of information IP addresses rarely are sufficient for anything at all except further research.
So you believe based on nothing more than your IP address showing up connected to alleged criminal activity, the police should be allowed to batter ram your door at 3am, shoot your dog dead, detonate explosive in your living room, and potentially kill you if you are not fully awake instantly and follow their commands to the letter with perfect accuracy?
Because that is how the US Police force "serves" a search warrant in 2016.
If I'm looking into an internet-related crime, the IP address of the offender is gonna be one of the first things I look at. Can someone falsify it? Yes. But not every offender _will_ falsify it, and so it's useful information to at least look into further, even if IP address by itself shouldn't be adequate evidence for a police raid.
..., break down your front door in the middle of the night, shoot your dog or someone from your household, throw in flash grenades... You know simply ruin your life.
Some might argue that that's how it should be, and is an example of the effectiveness of prosecutors, who save the state a lot of trouble and money in trying people who clearly are guilty by their own admission.
Others might call it a travesty of justice, and a mockery of the judicial process and the Constitution of the United States.
Remember the case of Aaron Schwartz.
It's also a good example as Schwart'z case is widely considered a blatant prosecutorial abuse of power, and symptomatic of a broken judicial system.
This is the one thing that irks me the most, I don't expect law enforcement to understand the technical side of things but this is just a complete failure to do good old fashioned police work. If a judge was asked to sign a search warrant predicated around the results of a homemade drug test tutorial on Wikihow there's no chance that they would ever consider granting it yet when the same thing is asked in regards to an IP address somehow that passes muster.
At a minimum, police should be required to contact the IANA to figure out which AS an IP belongs to and then contact the AS to figure out what the service address is for the customer. Academia is built around citing any kind of source information, why is that too much to ask for from law enforcement?
Ideally, law enforcement would contact IANA to get the AS, look and verify that that AS was the only one advertising that IP block at the time in question, get the serial number of the modem in question from the AS if the subscriber is using a DOCSIS modem, go to the service address and confirm that the modem is actually present at the service address by doing a disconnect at the road, and then execute the warrant. I get that most of this is pie in the sky wishful thinking, but omitting any of those steps could result in raiding an innocent person needlessly and a lot of those steps could be executed concurrently. Heck, you could also throw in looking for signs that the IP address in question is being used as a Tor node or any other simple proxy and sniffing wireless traffic and trying to correlate the timing of wireless frames to the traffic from the modem in question. You could even do the wireless sniffing at the same time you go out to verify where a modem is on the node.
Even though this would be extra work for law enforcement, wouldn't it be worth it many times over if it just saves a small proportion of innocent citizens from a dangerous police raid?
http://wspd.iheart.com/onair/scott-sands-50988/swat-team-rai...
> If police raided a home based only on an anonymous phone call claiming residents broke the law, it would be clearly unconstitutional.
> Yet EFF has found that police and courts are regularly conducting and approving raids based on the similar type of unreliable digital evidence: Internet Protocol (IP) address information.
When police go after an IP address, it happens after there is evidence linking it to some crime. That makes the situation wholly unlike an anonymous phone call, where there is no evidence a crime has even been committed, and where the identifying information itself is trivial to falsify.
Also, IP addresses give a lot more information than the article implies. Especially these days now that everyone has a home router that probably keeps the same IP address for weeks at a time if not months. Not enough to trigger a police raid, of course (if we want to argue that the police have too low a standard of evidence for initiating a raid, I agree) but it's probably a good lead to go on in the common case.
EDIT: I don't disagree with the rest of the article.