Re:A Digital Rumor Should Never Lead to a Police Raid
by michaelmrose on Thursday September 22, 2016 @05:07PM
(#12560373)
Without first going to the ISP and filing a warrant to get the information regarding whom had that ip address its not even enough for a warrant.
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.
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.