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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: MSI who wrote (62500)	12/21/2002 1:03:33 AM
From: D. Long	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

The problem with that is one of simple identification. First, there is no "internet phone number" to positively identify anyone. The username you use to login to your ISP is meaningless to the IP address space - it isn't contained in any of the protocol headers - and it isn't persistent to an IP address - 99.5% of ISPs use dynamic addressing. Also, it is incredibly easy to go through a proxy (or proxies) and become invisible. And the username itself is meaningless to positive identification, it only establishes that someone claiming to be "this person" registered the account, and someone (not necessarily the person supposedly registered) is using the account. As to sampling upper layer network traffic at the big hubs, best of luck. If the NSA is overwhelmed by phone network data sampling, they are going to slain by Internet network sampling. We're talking massive amounts of data for even a small sample. Derek