I am frankly shocked that some people claim that you cannot identify people by the IP address. There was a scandal in the States where a well known ISP released search records and the New York Times was able to identify individuals using the IP address together with the search records.

If a daily newspaper can, I suspect just about any body can ...

I see no difference between a static IP address and a credit card number. Neither are the individual's property, but that doesn't mean there should not be legal or ethical obligations surrounding them. 

As always my opinions are my opinions and not official corporate policy

Roderick S. Beck
Director of European Sales
Hibernia Atlantic
1, Passage du Chantier, 75012 Paris
http://www.hiberniaatlantic.com
Wireless: 1-212-444-8829.
Landline: 33-1-4346-3209.
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rod.beck@hiberniaatlantic.com
rodbeck@erols.com
``Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.'' Albert Einstein.



-----Original Message-----
From: owner-nanog@merit.edu on behalf of J. Oquendo
Sent: Thu 1/24/2008 12:57 PM
To: Roland Perry
Cc: nanog@merit.edu
Subject: Re: EU Official: IP Is Personal

Roland Perry wrote:

> Putting aside for a moment the issue of "whose dollars pay for it" there
> is no fundamental contradiction in the proposition that private sector
> information can be mandated to be kept for minimum periods, is
> confidential, but nevertheless can be acquired by lawful subpoena.
>
> Think about banking records, for example, which are confidential,
> routinely examined in criminal enquiries, and which have to be kept for
> various minimum periods by accountancy law. Operationally, the banks
> have had to invest in special departments to do just that, it's simply
> part of the cost of doing business.

The difference with banking records and computer generated records is,
you can literally track down whether by PIN on an ATM along with for the
majority of times an image taken from a camera. Try doing this with IP
generated information. While law enforcement subpoenas away information,
there is no guarantee person X is definitively behind even a static IP
address. Its hearsay no matter how you want to look at this. Outside of
the fact that lawyers still up to this day and age can't seem to grasp
an all-in-one argument to get IP address information thrown out, what's
next? Perhaps law enforcement agencies forcing vendors to include enough
memory on wireless devices to track who logged in on a hotspot?

Everyone sees the need for all sorts of accounting on the networking
side of things but how legitimate is the information when anyone can
share MAC addresses, jump into hotspots anonymously, quickly break into
wireless networks, venture into an Internet cafe paying cash, throw on a
bootable (throwaway) distribution of BSD/Linux/Solaris, do some dirty
deed and leave it up to someone else to take the blame.



--
====================================================
J. Oquendo

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