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Here's what I don't understand: You go to a judge for a warrant and the only piece of evidence you have an IP address. How is an IP address even remotely cons

Here's what I don't understand: You go to a judge for a warrant and the only piece of evidence you have an IP address. How is an IP address even remotely considered "evidence" enough to search someone's home? An IP address is not an identity. It is not a location. It is not even permanent in most cases! I cannot fathom that police are granted warrants to search and seize people's homes and property based solely on, "logs indicate an illegal file was uploaded from this IP address." That is incredibly flimsy evidence. At the very least they should create a profile on the individuals and demonstrate that they were present in the home and appeared to be using their computers at the time of the crime. They didn't even do the most basic of police work in this case. WTF!?

rdtsc 11y ago
It just highlights the rubber-stamp aspect of it. How many of the search warrants are reject really? For example in case of the FISA court: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Foreign_Intelligence_Surveillance_Court https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Foreign_Intellig... Since 2010 there have been more than 6000 requests and 0 denials. They could have showed up with anything, and request would have been granted. I have no doubt that both parties see this as "need to follow rules" formality and nothing else.
ocdtrekkie 11y ago
There's a huge difference between evidence strong enough to convict someone (it's reasonably held that an IP address is not good enough evidence to charge a person with a crime) and probable cause for a warrant. I'd argue it's more than adequate to get a warrant. Again, a warrant is only having reasonable suspicion to go look and see if something illegal is going on, it's not a determination of guilt.
rayiner 11y ago
They clearly had more than just an IP address--they had an IP address and the identity of the user who was assigned the IP address at the time. If police found a post-it with a house address in a context where it was clear that it was connected to the perpetrator, that would easily be sufficient for a warrant. The bar is not supposed to be a high one.
flashman 11y ago
> How is an IP address even remotely considered "evidence" enough to search someone's home? Because it localises a particular network request to a piece of hardware, e.g. a modem, located within that home. In my opinion, in the absence of evidence that someone was running a Tor exit node, or that their wireless network was unprotected, there is a high probability that the network request was originally sent by a device within that home, or by a network user known to the owner. Regular people aren't like technical people: a lot of them have no idea that their nefarious behaviour can and will be tracked back to their home. I would guess that most warrants granted solely on an IP address actually turn up incriminating evidence.
cplease 11y ago
Seriously? They didn't just have an IP address. Police had an IP address and timestamp of a video of child-rape, as provided by 4-chan, said IP address belonging to an ISP as provided by MaxMind, and said ISP confirming its ownership of the IP and providing a subscriber name and address for that IP and timestamp, indicating that the posting originated from a cable modem at a residential location. If you don't find child rape to be compelling, substitute an email plotting a bomb attack, a suicide note, etc. etc. Police are supposed to ignore that, and what, ask for a signed confession? They don't need proof beyond a reasonable doubt, they need probable cause that there is evidence of a crime. Tor is deliberately designed to frustrate what police call "evidence." The police are perfectly justified in searching that location for evidence that might lead to the source of the criminal activity.
- visarga 11y ago
  Solution: rent an empty room and place TOR exit node equipment there. When the police comes, it's just a computer room with no logs or files cached locally. They can do all the searches they want. Also, TOR should have a blacklist of CP sites to filter out as much of the bad traffic as possible. It doesn't do anyone any good to allow CP on exit nodes. Even if the sites are using https, the exit node could sample a few pages to pass the data into a CP classifier and whitelist/reject the site. This classification work could be aggregated over many exit nodes to maintain an up-to date filter. In the end, if we can assure TOR node hosts that their IPs will not be used for CP, it would ensure more people are willing to offer their resources to the network.

rdtsc 11y ago

It just highlights the rubber-stamp aspect of it. How many of the search warrants are reject really? For example in case of the FISA court: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Foreign_Intelligence_Surveillance_Court https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Foreign_Intellig... Since 2010 there have been more than 6000 requests and 0 denials. They could have showed up with anything, and request would have been granted. I have no doubt that both parties see this as "need to follow rules" formality and nothing else.

ocdtrekkie 11y ago

There's a huge difference between evidence strong enough to convict someone (it's reasonably held that an IP address is not good enough evidence to charge a person with a crime) and probable cause for a warrant. I'd argue it's more than adequate to get a warrant. Again, a warrant is only having reasonable suspicion to go look and see if something illegal is going on, it's not a determination of guilt.

rayiner 11y ago

They clearly had more than just an IP address--they had an IP address and the identity of the user who was assigned the IP address at the time. If police found a post-it with a house address in a context where it was clear that it was connected to the perpetrator, that would easily be sufficient for a warrant. The bar is not supposed to be a high one.

flashman 11y ago

> How is an IP address even remotely considered "evidence" enough to search someone's home? Because it localises a particular network request to a piece of hardware, e.g. a modem, located within that home. In my opinion, in the absence of evidence that someone was running a Tor exit node, or that their wireless network was unprotected, there is a high probability that the network request was originally sent by a device within that home, or by a network user known to the owner. Regular people aren't like technical people: a lot of them have no idea that their nefarious behaviour can and will be tracked back to their home. I would guess that most warrants granted solely on an IP address actually turn up incriminating evidence.

cplease 11y ago

Seriously? They didn't just have an IP address. Police had an IP address and timestamp of a video of child-rape, as provided by 4-chan, said IP address belonging to an ISP as provided by MaxMind, and said ISP confirming its ownership of the IP and providing a subscriber name and address for that IP and timestamp, indicating that the posting originated from a cable modem at a residential location. If you don't find child rape to be compelling, substitute an email plotting a bomb attack, a suicide note, etc. etc. Police are supposed to ignore that, and what, ask for a signed confession? They don't need proof beyond a reasonable doubt, they need probable cause that there is evidence of a crime. Tor is deliberately designed to frustrate what police call "evidence." The police are perfectly justified in searching that location for evidence that might lead to the source of the criminal activity.

visarga 11y ago
Solution: rent an empty room and place TOR exit node equipment there. When the police comes, it's just a computer room with no logs or files cached locally. They can do all the searches they want. Also, TOR should have a blacklist of CP sites to filter out as much of the bad traffic as possible. It doesn't do anyone any good to allow CP on exit nodes. Even if the sites are using https, the exit node could sample a few pages to pass the data into a CP classifier and whitelist/reject the site. This classification work could be aggregated over many exit nodes to maintain an up-to date filter. In the end, if we can assure TOR node hosts that their IPs will not be used for CP, it would ensure more people are willing to offer their resources to the network.