Posted on 02/13/2005 5:01:39 PM PST by JohnathanRGalt
"Strangely enough, only Islamist terrorists seem immune to tracing on the internet."
Or the FBI, Secret Service, NSA etc. don't publish their tracking methods?
Sure, your IP is detectable on a session-by-session basis, and the Web sites you visit collect them as a matter of course. Not for malevolent purposes, but to track statistical use of the site.
But unless your ISP expressly gave you a static (fixed) IP address, your IP address changes whenever you dialup to your ISP or wait for a new IP to be generated on DSL/cable (the "lease" time) or you forcibly get a new IP address from your DSL/cable provider (which you can easily do by simply resetting your DSL/cable modem).
In fact it's non-trivial to link a specific human being with a specific IP address.
You could read behind the lines to infer that the Dan Pearl murderers were caught by (quite stupidly) sending threatening Hotmails to the WSJ and other media. Stupid because Hotmail embeds the source IP address in the email header, which in the case of Pearl was traced back to an Internet cafe in Karachi, which was then surveilled until the idiots came back. Simple.
IIRC KSM made a similar error in computer use, and presumably other Islamists have been busted in the same basic manner.
The difference between Islamist sites and, say, child porn sites is that the latter can be ID'd by law enforcement and then used as a "honeypot" to nab other visitors.
To do so, LEOs would simply enlist the ISP to capture source IPs and pages visited (presumably with a warrant, and an absolute no-brainer with Web server software), and then go to the source ISPs and similarly subpoena their DHCP logs to see which user(s) were on those IPs at a specific time and place. Busted.
Islamist sites are known to be very transient - they're hosted by one ISP today and another next week, or on non-US sites, or whatever - so it can be logistically difficult to get things in order to accomplish a sting.
Example, after ID'ing an Islamist site hosted in UAE, you'd need the cooperation of UAE law enforcement, then UAE LEOs would need to gain cooperation of that UAE ISP (probably not difficult at that stage), then get Web logs back to US LEO's, who would then have to subpoena source IPs from all the ISP's involved. That would work with US users, but forget about it if they're from all around the world. Again, sheer logistics.
In the case of state-run ISPs and hosting services which have already agreed to cooperate with US law enforcement, the turnaround would be faster, there might already be procedures in place to set up these kinds of stings.
Sophisticated Islamists who use proxy software at their source PC would be able to mask their source IP address which makes much of this undoable, though again due to logistics, not because it's a technical impossibility.
Tracing IP's isn't rocket science to the tens of thousands of network engineers around the world, and it's by no means a secret. Tools and docs are posted all over the Internet, and have been for many years.
Law enforcement agencies (which employ network engineers and computer security folks for precisely these purposes) have the benefit of legal access to ISP logs via warrant or subpoena. Those are key to busting Islamist scum in the act.
Speedy logistics and international reach are the other key factors. One would need to act fast, and often to gain access to foreign ISP logs (one would thus need the cooperation of foreign governments and foreign law enforcement).
Watch a (good) homicide detective at work. You'd think he was more interested in the modus operandi of the perpetrator than in the fact that a murder had been committed.
"You'd think he was more interested in the modus operandi of the perpetrator than in the fact that a murder had been committed."
...and probably get a littel more than peeved if somebody tipped off the the perp to the survallance activity?
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