FBI and Next-Gen P2P Monitoring

AHuxley writes "Can the FBI get funding to create a next-generation network monitoring and database system for P2P networks, web sites, and chat rooms? Could the FBI's Regional Information Sharing Systems (RISS) network be opened to more law enforcement agents across the USA? Will the tracking of p2p users via 'unique serial numbers' generated from a person's computer be expanded from its first use in late 2005? Is your p2p application or plug-in sending back your MAC address, firmware revision, manufacture date, GUID or other details?" Could this story submitter pose any more questions in his submission? Won't someone please think of the ... oh, never mind.

Comments

Dupe?

[mrvan]

Senator Proposes to Monitor All P2P Traffic for Illegal Files, it talks about the same plan by the same senator, and I don't see any new developments.

Seriously though, how difficult is it to use the slashdot search engine with the capitalized words in the title? third hit...

Who cares?

[RiotingPacifist]

Is your p2p application or plug in sending back your MAC address, firmware revision, manufacture date, GUID or other details?

apt-get install macchanger
sudo macchanger -r

I'm no computer scientist but isn't it fairly trivial for them to get your mac (or at least that of your router) from your network traffic anyway?

Re:Who cares?

[mrvan]

I'm no computer scientist but isn't it fairly trivial for them to get your mac (or at least that of your router) from your network traffic anyway? If I'm not mistaken, MAC never leaves the immediate network, ie your router gets your mac, the next hop that of the router, and so on, but the final destination only gets the mac of the last router in between

Re:Who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm no computer scientist but isn't it fairly trivial for them to get your mac (or at least that of your router) from your network traffic anyway? If I'm not mistaken, MAC never leaves the immediate network, ie your router gets your mac, the next hop that of the router, and so on, but the final destination only gets the mac of the last router in between You would be correct. A MAC (Media Access Control) address is a local identifier only. In fact it only really applies to switching, not routing. Unless a piece of software on your computer is sending it "home" then it would be rather difficult to obtain your MAC address. Also, it is by no means a unique identifier. It's a well known fact that manufacturers of network devices regularly cycle MAC addresses. It's uncommon, but not unheard of to end up with two devices on a network with the same MAC.

All Fear, No Facts

[houstonbofh]

Heavy on fear, but light on facts... And with so many popular torrent programs open source, all of the sneakiness is no longer possible. No magic serial, or mac address in my torrent program. Oh, and it is encrypted.

Re:All Fear, No Facts

[Anonymous Coward]

The encryption on torrent transfers doesn't do shit as far as protection goes. Anyone connected to the same torrent will be connected to you and know what you're doing.

All the encryption really does is keep ISP's from throttling you unless they throttle all encrypted traffic (which some do).

Re:All Fear, No Facts

[archeopterix]

If nobody is doing that already, color me surprised....

Paint yourself half-unsurprised then. MUTE filesharing does something similar. A client communicates directly with a small number of peers and nobody can tell whether a request (or response) comes directly from their neighbor or is merely relayed, so you get plausible deniability. Uh, and it uses an interesting algorithm for routing, similar to one used by ants in real life.

Answers

[gEvil (beta)]

AHuxley:
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes

CmdrTaco:
Yes

Hope that helps everyone.

Another 60 million per year.

[Animats]

Here's the actual bill. $60 million per year. 15 cosponsors.

This is another piece of Bush Administration "security theater". Write to your representatives in Congress and your Senators to get them to put this money into fighting spam and computer crime.

Re:FBI Sofware Projects are Notorious for Failures

[CastrTroy]

You think that's bad? The Canadian gun registry cost $2 BILLION. All for a database to track who owns a gun. You could probably put together a similar application in a matter of weeks.