3 ms·

About time. Identifying people by IP address is like identifying people that live in a certain house. A house can have many people living in it. It's not a one-

About time. Identifying people by IP address is like identifying people that live in a certain house. A house can have many people living in it. It's not a one-to-one mapping.

tzs 15y ago
The law already knows how to deal with that. It's called a search warrant. When many people are living in a house, and you have sufficient reason to believe that one of them has committed a crime, you can get a search warrant to do search the house. The case at hand is a civil case, where the option of a search warrant is not available. If it were a child porn case, the police would still be able to get a warrant to search the house where the IP address is assigned.
- ataggart 15y ago
  It's not clear to me that armed men busting down people's doors at 3am is a preferable model.
  - zcid 15y ago
    That's exactly what this could be the precedent to prevent. The mistaken pornographer case showed that an IP is not necessarily evidence enough for a warrant, esp. a no-knock warrant. It will quite possibly lead to requiring more evidence than just an IP in the future.
  - wtallis 15y ago
    Not all search warrants are no-knock warrants.
- varikin 15y ago
  I think is the right idea. An IP address is a piece in the puzzle of evidence. By itself, it should not be enough to prove guilt, but it might be enough for a search warrant. I hope is that as time goes on, the legal system (and hopefully all parts of the government) better learn how technologies work and don't work so they can make more informed decisions. Hopefully, as the younger generation start their careers in those fields, they bring better understanding of technologies with them. Though there is another article I read today that is an anecdotal story about someone my age that doesn't know difference between a web browser and search engine. After writing all this, it reminded me of a friend. He is now an IT manager and his wife is a lawyer (currently a judge's assistant I think). They were talking a couple years ago about the lack of credible expert witnesses in the IT field. She had seen that they are not staying current in the IT field, similarly what can happen with conference speakers. They spend all their time talking about technologies while not having the time to gain a deep knowledge of new technologies. I seem to taken a tangent towards the end (or maybe the beginning), but oh well.

About time. Identifying people by IP address is like identifying people that live in a certain house. A house can have many people living in it. It's not a one-to-one mapping.

tzs 15y ago

The law already knows how to deal with that. It's called a search warrant. When many people are living in a house, and you have sufficient reason to believe that one of them has committed a crime, you can get a search warrant to do search the house. The case at hand is a civil case, where the option of a search warrant is not available. If it were a child porn case, the police would still be able to get a warrant to search the house where the IP address is assigned.

ataggart 15y ago
It's not clear to me that armed men busting down people's doors at 3am is a preferable model.
- zcid 15y ago
  That's exactly what this could be the precedent to prevent. The mistaken pornographer case showed that an IP is not necessarily evidence enough for a warrant, esp. a no-knock warrant. It will quite possibly lead to requiring more evidence than just an IP in the future.
- wtallis 15y ago
  Not all search warrants are no-knock warrants.
varikin 15y ago
I think is the right idea. An IP address is a piece in the puzzle of evidence. By itself, it should not be enough to prove guilt, but it might be enough for a search warrant. I hope is that as time goes on, the legal system (and hopefully all parts of the government) better learn how technologies work and don't work so they can make more informed decisions. Hopefully, as the younger generation start their careers in those fields, they bring better understanding of technologies with them. Though there is another article I read today that is an anecdotal story about someone my age that doesn't know difference between a web browser and search engine. After writing all this, it reminded me of a friend. He is now an IT manager and his wife is a lawyer (currently a judge's assistant I think). They were talking a couple years ago about the lack of credible expert witnesses in the IT field. She had seen that they are not staying current in the IT field, similarly what can happen with conference speakers. They spend all their time talking about technologies while not having the time to gain a deep knowledge of new technologies. I seem to taken a tangent towards the end (or maybe the beginning), but oh well.