There are so many things wrong with that sentence that I don't have any idea where to start. In cases where it's that bad, one has to wonder why there's shared custody involved.
Because, to deny a parent the right to see their children, you have to be able to PROVE that the children are at risk from the parent. And that can be difficult. Some types of abuse don't leave bruises or wounds as evidence. And most children are unable to testify reliably against their own parents.
"So much money"? Are you kidding? I paid $30 for my phone, and $20 for 80 minutes that last three months. $7/month is a trivial expense, even for a relatively poor person.
Wow.
Yeah, $7/month isn't much money. However, there's no way to pay $7/month for a prepaid cell phone. It's called "prepaid" for a reason.
Many, many victims of domestic violence are also severely restricted from access to money. All money is in the abuser's name; they are the breadwinner, they keep the checkbook and the credit card. Money for groceries, if the other spouse does the shopping, is meted out and meticulously reconciled. Any discrepancies are punished.
So yeah, $50 is probably a LOT more money than many domestic violence victims have on hand. $7 may be. Even if the family was solidly middle-class, the victim has no access to the money in a lot of cases.
And really, if the choice is between spending that $50 on groceries to feed your children (that's more than a week's worth of food, if you're careful) and a prepaid cell phone, what are you going to choose?
The vast majority of battering victims are female, and the vast majority of abusers are male. That's a function of biology; to victimize someone physically, it helps tremendously if you are larger and stronger than them. I know at least one mixed-sex couple where the female member has that advantage over the male, but due to the distribution of sizes among genders, it's very, very rare.
I'd guess that, even when battering victims are male, their abusers are usually male too... and when batterers are female, their victims are usually also female.
So, yes, when discussing domestic violence, it's customary to assume that the victim is female and the perpetrator is male, since that's the case for the vast majority of incidents. There are also offices that run Linux on their desktop machines, but in general, it's safe to assume that an office desktop computer runs Windows, right?
If a battered wife wants to talk directly to her abusive husband, then she is absolutely stupid. Sorry. Battered wives should talk to abusive husband thru lawyers and police officers only.
Yes, because someone who escaped her home with nothing but the clothes on her back can just summon legal help at the drop of a hat...
What if there are *children* involved? What if she had to leave them behind? And even though she can get the police to escort her back to retrieve personal items, they won't necessarily call and make the arrangements for her, so she still has to make the call, probably from where she's sheltering.
And then, let's say, the lawyers are done, the divorce is final, and the custody agreement is set. Let's even say that dad doesn't have unsupervised visitation, because of his history of abuse. It *still* may be a Very Bad Thing if he knows where his ex-wife is staying. Especially if it's with, say, his own sister.
Giving someone your address does not imply to them that they are welcome into your house and can take a full inventory of what you own, and put a camera in every room.
However, your ISP giving someone your IP address implies your entire "inventory" of internet searching is now available for viewing.
How? Just how does it do that?
Also, what if they already have your IP address and associated knowledge of internet activity, but are looking for a name to go with it?
The fact that he now made it open season to anyone with "lawful authority" (whatever the hell that means) to contact the ISP and look at your internet history, for whatever reason they well feel like, probable cause or not. What sites you visit, what files you download, etc... just brutal.
That would be brutal. That is not, however, what ACTUALLY HAPPENED.
Anyway, it's not like anyone can spoof an IP address anyway, right? (j/k we know better) so then what if someone does, and the cops don't figure it out and they go after the wrong guy?
And it's not like I can mail a threatening letter and use my worst enemy's address as the return, either.
Comparing IP addresses to residential addresses would be reasonable if the consequences of disclosing them were the same. But they're not.
That's true. The consequences of revealing your physical address are much greater.
If the police, without a warrant, could easily find out the contents of the postal mail that's delivered to any residential address, you'd better believe that people would want to keep their residential addresses private.
Wait, what?
What part of this case is anything like the police going through your mail?
And, if there was no way for the police or anyone else to identify the contents of Internet traffic based on IP address, then people wouldn't care that much about keeping their IP addresses secret.
Uh... can you just summarize for me the method you'd use to "identify the contents of Internet traffic based on IP address" without physical access to the user's computer or a wiretapping warrant?
Keep in mind, if the police get a warrant to search my mail, they get to know what's in my mail. That's not the same as knowing my address, even though if they have my address, and they sit in front of my house when the mail carrier comes, my mail is RIGHT THERE and they could just reach out and grab it... if that wasn't illegal, of course.
First, I want to start by stating that I agree with the basic premise of the original Op-Ed piece that these comments are attached to - namely that there is no good reason why police/prosecutors shouldn't get a warrant or subpoena for this information - users should have a reasonable expectation of privacy when using the Internet.
Yes, to the same extent that they have a reasonable expectation of privacy while using the phone.
A phone conversation between two people is in some ways privileged to those two people. BUT, if the police ask the person you were talking to about the conversation, they have the option of answering. They *may* be required to answer in some situations (so long as the answer doesn't incriminate them).
If the person you were talking to is accused of a crime, their phone records will probably be pulled during the investigation. Those records may point to illicit activity on the parts of other persons, or at the very least may point toward witnesses that can be valuable in pressing charges. Now they'll get the NAMES, and possibly addresses, of the owners of those phone numbers from the phone company.
Do they need a warrant for that? Should they?
They *do* and *should* need a warrant to listen to your phone conversations. But that is a different situation.
You have a reasonable expectation of privacy inside your home. But that doesn't mean the police can't look up your address and ring your bell.
It appears that, in this case, the IP address was being used as exactly that: and ADDRESS. A pointer to an account, an indication of a physical location, a way of narrowing down an identity. As such, the police requested the associated information and the ISP provided it without a warrant. The same can be done with phone numbers and physical addresses, in both directions, regardless of whether you are unlisted or use a PO Box or whatever.
Why do you, at the end of your comment, ask a question that was fully answered in-depth by the article?
Actually, far from answering in-depth, the article never once touches on the existence or use of reverse directories, which is a major oversight in critiquing the telephone analogy.
Uhhh.... what logs? The defendant argued that it was illegal for the police to ask the ISP for his *identity* based on his IP. Not for the logs themselves.
B) Even if so, its not the same thing. As mentioned it is more akin to getting a list of who you called, and when, and what you talked about, for how long, etc...
C) Sure about it? Fairly. Ready to provide a cite this second? No. I've always had unlisted phone numbers, though, and have never assumed that my info was private from law enforcement.
D) No, the ISP gave NO log information, just identity of the holder of the IP. That you could use that IP address to look up other information on various web servers is true; but, it appears that had *already happened* by the time the identity information was requested.
I do not know of an ISP that provides a "listed" internet service, either. I can't find personal addresses from IPs, so it's not listed.
I can't find person's names from phone numbers... does that mean they're not listed?
If I operate a website, and someone visits it, I can capture their IP address. Many web forums routinely log the IP address that a particular account logs in from for a variety of purposes. Also, my IP address will be in the headers of any email I send. This tells me that my IP address is NOT private information, and is tied to my internet "identity". Slashdot knows the IP address for "Ironica." Now, they don't know my "real name," but I could drop my clothes off at the dry cleaners and tell them my name was Ironica, unless they had a policy against it (which Slashdot doesn't). I could pay cash so there wasn't a CC with my name on it. I actually have potentially *more* privacy at the dry cleaners than I do on Slashdot, and I understand this.
I don't think I exactly feel *sorry* for the guy who didn't understand this and got burned on kiddie porn charges, but I'm sure that in the early days of telephones (or with the advent of digital signaling and the new bells and whistles available with that), a lot of people didn't understand how that worked, either. To quote Blink-182, "What the hell is Call ID?"
Now, if you email them, and they forward it to their friends, who forward it, etc, etc, then EVERY person that EVER gets that email, will get your IP address!
Come again?
Bennett Haselton's next article can be about the problems slashdotters have with understanding how IP information works.
I think this is the basic issue crystallized in the You are not a Lawyer article posted a few days ago. The argument that the techies make would be that "The IP address cannot be used to convict you!" but it's not. It's just used to find out who to investigate, so they can get all the *other* evidence used to convict.
A) No expectation of Privacy. Your name and number is PUBLISHED in the phone book. You agree to this when you get a number, unless you get it unlisted, in which case they could not get at it.
But the cops still can. Even though I may not be able to call up 411 and get an unlisted phone number, law enforcement can.
If an IP address is like an unlisted phone number, then why would we expect that law enforcement couldn't request its owner identity in the course of an investigation?
If I, as a private citizen, cannot call up the ISP and get the same information; then that information should not be considered public by reasonable expectation; and should require a warrant.
So, if I can't call up the DMV and find out who a particular license plate is registered to, the cops should need a warrant to get that information to follow a lead in a case?
Law enforcement should have NO special privileges to biographical information at all without a warrant? They should have to get a warrant for every single witness they want to track down and question in a case?
Do you know what's involved in getting a warrant? All of them are granted by a judge on a sworn affidavit. The process is often fairly efficient, but it's not trivial. It shouldn't be, because that process protects our rights... but it also means that, for information that it's reasonable for the government (including law enforcement) to have, it's overly burdensome. That information includes identifying and basic biographical information about people. They're allowed to find out who you are and how to contact you.
Yes, but not to provide a way to look up a number and find the owner (reverse lookup). This is a relatively recent innovation and one that I doubt people considered twenty years ago when allowing their numbers to be listed. In other words, twenty years ago, people had a reasonable expecation that their number would not give away their identity even if they were listed in the phone book
Reverse directories have existed for as long as phone directories have. They just used to be on paper, and they've never been dumped on your front porch unbidden.
The police have never needed a warrant to capture the biographical information attached to a phone number that was used in committing a crime, whether that phone number was listed to the public or not. Similarly, they do not (and have never) needed a warrant to find out the physical address a PO Box is associated with (and the Post Office requires that physical address for you to sign up for a PO Box).
This is the biggest mistake that Bennett Haselton makes in his article: the judge's decision said that an IP address and the associated user is biographical information that one cannot expect to be private from THE STATE, i.e. the government or the police in the carrying out of their normal duties. This is quite distinct from your expectation of privacy from non-governmental entities. I'm on the Do Not Call list, and my number is unlisted, but if someone makes obscene phone calls from my landline, the most that's required to get my phone number is that the recipient file a police report and fax it to their phone company, who then puts a traceback on their line. Once the phone number is obtained, the police find out who it belongs to, and come to the door. No warrant is required.
If Bennett Haselton wanted to attack the premise that an IP address can be used as a reliable method of IDENTIFYING an individual or even a computer, fine then. But I suspect that the case had already nullified that argument in some other way, since it's the most obvious one.
(Then we can get into the fact that his innovative system of soliciting expert testimony is already a tried-and-true component of the justice system... but someone already made that point.)
All in all, by halfway through I was just reading this so I could comment on it and say "I *did* RTFC, and I'd rather hear what a lawyer thinks about it than a mathematician." (IANAL, IAATP [I am a transportation planner], so in his view, I'm qualified to critique lawyers and other experts.)
What is it with people today? You want to know stuff, but can't be bothered reading something that IS a summary, of a lengthy court proceeding involving lots of debate on principles, history, etc.?
It was commentary on the decision, NOT a summary of the decision. I read it, so I know this. You? I'm left wondering.
The Aztecs, and many other Central and South American native civilizations, had a tribute system of government, where you donated your time at your turn to running things. It was fairly effective; after all, when it was your turn, you daren't mess with anyone, because they'd get their turn, too.
The Conquistadores told them they had to have elected leaders. So, they started having elections. It took a while for the Spaniards to figure out that they were just "electing" the guy whose turn it was.
I've ruminated on how you'd do such a tribute system on the scale of a country the size of the United States. It certainly is a compelling idea.
Slashdot Mirror
There are so many things wrong with that sentence that I don't have any idea where to start. In cases where it's that bad, one has to wonder why there's shared custody involved.
Because, to deny a parent the right to see their children, you have to be able to PROVE that the children are at risk from the parent. And that can be difficult. Some types of abuse don't leave bruises or wounds as evidence. And most children are unable to testify reliably against their own parents.
"So much money"? Are you kidding? I paid $30 for my phone, and $20 for 80 minutes that last three months. $7/month is a trivial expense, even for a relatively poor person.
Wow.
Yeah, $7/month isn't much money. However, there's no way to pay $7/month for a prepaid cell phone. It's called "prepaid" for a reason.
Many, many victims of domestic violence are also severely restricted from access to money. All money is in the abuser's name; they are the breadwinner, they keep the checkbook and the credit card. Money for groceries, if the other spouse does the shopping, is meted out and meticulously reconciled. Any discrepancies are punished.
So yeah, $50 is probably a LOT more money than many domestic violence victims have on hand. $7 may be. Even if the family was solidly middle-class, the victim has no access to the money in a lot of cases.
And really, if the choice is between spending that $50 on groceries to feed your children (that's more than a week's worth of food, if you're careful) and a prepaid cell phone, what are you going to choose?
The vast majority of battering victims are female, and the vast majority of abusers are male. That's a function of biology; to victimize someone physically, it helps tremendously if you are larger and stronger than them. I know at least one mixed-sex couple where the female member has that advantage over the male, but due to the distribution of sizes among genders, it's very, very rare.
I'd guess that, even when battering victims are male, their abusers are usually male too... and when batterers are female, their victims are usually also female.
So, yes, when discussing domestic violence, it's customary to assume that the victim is female and the perpetrator is male, since that's the case for the vast majority of incidents. There are also offices that run Linux on their desktop machines, but in general, it's safe to assume that an office desktop computer runs Windows, right?
If a battered wife wants to talk directly to her abusive husband, then she is absolutely stupid. Sorry. Battered wives should talk to abusive husband thru lawyers and police officers only.
Yes, because someone who escaped her home with nothing but the clothes on her back can just summon legal help at the drop of a hat...
What if there are *children* involved? What if she had to leave them behind? And even though she can get the police to escort her back to retrieve personal items, they won't necessarily call and make the arrangements for her, so she still has to make the call, probably from where she's sheltering.
And then, let's say, the lawyers are done, the divorce is final, and the custody agreement is set. Let's even say that dad doesn't have unsupervised visitation, because of his history of abuse. It *still* may be a Very Bad Thing if he knows where his ex-wife is staying. Especially if it's with, say, his own sister.
I've never even heard of Jah-Wren Ryel before this conversation, and now I won't ever let him (or her) near my kids!
Giving someone your address does not imply to them that they are welcome into your house and can take a full inventory of what you own, and put a camera in every room.
However, your ISP giving someone your IP address implies your entire "inventory" of internet searching is now available for viewing.
How? Just how does it do that?
Also, what if they already have your IP address and associated knowledge of internet activity, but are looking for a name to go with it?
The fact that he now made it open season to anyone with "lawful authority" (whatever the hell that means) to contact the ISP and look at your internet history, for whatever reason they well feel like, probable cause or not. What sites you visit, what files you download, etc... just brutal.
That would be brutal. That is not, however, what ACTUALLY HAPPENED.
Anyway, it's not like anyone can spoof an IP address anyway, right? (j/k we know better) so then what if someone does, and the cops don't figure it out and they go after the wrong guy?
And it's not like I can mail a threatening letter and use my worst enemy's address as the return, either.
Comparing IP addresses to residential addresses would be reasonable if the consequences of disclosing them were the same. But they're not.
That's true. The consequences of revealing your physical address are much greater.
If the police, without a warrant, could easily find out the contents of the postal mail that's delivered to any residential address, you'd better believe that people would want to keep their residential addresses private.
Wait, what?
What part of this case is anything like the police going through your mail?
And, if there was no way for the police or anyone else to identify the contents of Internet traffic based on IP address, then people wouldn't care that much about keeping their IP addresses secret.
Uh... can you just summarize for me the method you'd use to "identify the contents of Internet traffic based on IP address" without physical access to the user's computer or a wiretapping warrant?
Keep in mind, if the police get a warrant to search my mail, they get to know what's in my mail. That's not the same as knowing my address, even though if they have my address, and they sit in front of my house when the mail carrier comes, my mail is RIGHT THERE and they could just reach out and grab it... if that wasn't illegal, of course.
First, I want to start by stating that I agree with the basic premise of the original Op-Ed piece that these comments are attached to - namely that there is no good reason why police/prosecutors shouldn't get a warrant or subpoena for this information - users should have a reasonable expectation of privacy when using the Internet.
Yes, to the same extent that they have a reasonable expectation of privacy while using the phone.
A phone conversation between two people is in some ways privileged to those two people. BUT, if the police ask the person you were talking to about the conversation, they have the option of answering. They *may* be required to answer in some situations (so long as the answer doesn't incriminate them).
If the person you were talking to is accused of a crime, their phone records will probably be pulled during the investigation. Those records may point to illicit activity on the parts of other persons, or at the very least may point toward witnesses that can be valuable in pressing charges. Now they'll get the NAMES, and possibly addresses, of the owners of those phone numbers from the phone company.
Do they need a warrant for that? Should they?
They *do* and *should* need a warrant to listen to your phone conversations. But that is a different situation.
You have a reasonable expectation of privacy inside your home. But that doesn't mean the police can't look up your address and ring your bell.
It appears that, in this case, the IP address was being used as exactly that: and ADDRESS. A pointer to an account, an indication of a physical location, a way of narrowing down an identity. As such, the police requested the associated information and the ISP provided it without a warrant. The same can be done with phone numbers and physical addresses, in both directions, regardless of whether you are unlisted or use a PO Box or whatever.
Oh, heavens no, I'm glad there's no such thing for us.
Why do you, at the end of your comment, ask a question that was fully answered in-depth by the article?
Actually, far from answering in-depth, the article never once touches on the existence or use of reverse directories, which is a major oversight in critiquing the telephone analogy.
Uhhh.... what logs? The defendant argued that it was illegal for the police to ask the ISP for his *identity* based on his IP. Not for the logs themselves.
My concern here is what the cops did to determine that a particular IP was downloading kiddie-porn.
In many of these cases, they bust a kiddie-porn ring and grab the log files off the server they were hosting.
A) Are you sure about that. I am not.
B) Even if so, its not the same thing. As mentioned it is more akin to getting a list of who you called, and when, and what you talked about, for how long, etc...
C) Sure about it? Fairly. Ready to provide a cite this second? No. I've always had unlisted phone numbers, though, and have never assumed that my info was private from law enforcement.
D) No, the ISP gave NO log information, just identity of the holder of the IP. That you could use that IP address to look up other information on various web servers is true; but, it appears that had *already happened* by the time the identity information was requested.
So it's the ISP's information? Does that mean they can disclose it if they so choose?
I do not know of an ISP that provides a "listed" internet service, either. I can't find personal addresses from IPs, so it's not listed.
I can't find person's names from phone numbers... does that mean they're not listed?
If I operate a website, and someone visits it, I can capture their IP address. Many web forums routinely log the IP address that a particular account logs in from for a variety of purposes. Also, my IP address will be in the headers of any email I send. This tells me that my IP address is NOT private information, and is tied to my internet "identity". Slashdot knows the IP address for "Ironica." Now, they don't know my "real name," but I could drop my clothes off at the dry cleaners and tell them my name was Ironica, unless they had a policy against it (which Slashdot doesn't). I could pay cash so there wasn't a CC with my name on it. I actually have potentially *more* privacy at the dry cleaners than I do on Slashdot, and I understand this.
I don't think I exactly feel *sorry* for the guy who didn't understand this and got burned on kiddie porn charges, but I'm sure that in the early days of telephones (or with the advent of digital signaling and the new bells and whistles available with that), a lot of people didn't understand how that worked, either. To quote Blink-182, "What the hell is Call ID?"
Now, if you email them, and they forward it to their friends, who forward it, etc, etc, then EVERY person that EVER gets that email, will get your IP address!
Come again?
Bennett Haselton's next article can be about the problems slashdotters have with understanding how IP information works.
I think this is the basic issue crystallized in the You are not a Lawyer article posted a few days ago. The argument that the techies make would be that "The IP address cannot be used to convict you!" but it's not. It's just used to find out who to investigate, so they can get all the *other* evidence used to convict.
Not the same thing at all.
A) No expectation of Privacy. Your name and number is PUBLISHED in the phone book. You agree to this when you get a number, unless you get it unlisted, in which case they could not get at it.
But the cops still can. Even though I may not be able to call up 411 and get an unlisted phone number, law enforcement can.
If an IP address is like an unlisted phone number, then why would we expect that law enforcement couldn't request its owner identity in the course of an investigation?
If I, as a private citizen, cannot call up the ISP and get the same information; then that information should not be considered public by reasonable expectation; and should require a warrant.
So, if I can't call up the DMV and find out who a particular license plate is registered to, the cops should need a warrant to get that information to follow a lead in a case?
Law enforcement should have NO special privileges to biographical information at all without a warrant? They should have to get a warrant for every single witness they want to track down and question in a case?
Do you know what's involved in getting a warrant? All of them are granted by a judge on a sworn affidavit. The process is often fairly efficient, but it's not trivial. It shouldn't be, because that process protects our rights... but it also means that, for information that it's reasonable for the government (including law enforcement) to have, it's overly burdensome. That information includes identifying and basic biographical information about people. They're allowed to find out who you are and how to contact you.
Yes, but not to provide a way to look up a number and find the owner (reverse lookup). This is a relatively recent innovation and one that I doubt people considered twenty years ago when allowing their numbers to be listed. In other words, twenty years ago, people had a reasonable expecation that their number would not give away their identity even if they were listed in the phone book
Reverse directories have existed for as long as phone directories have. They just used to be on paper, and they've never been dumped on your front porch unbidden.
How about if the phone number is unlisted?
The police have never needed a warrant to capture the biographical information attached to a phone number that was used in committing a crime, whether that phone number was listed to the public or not. Similarly, they do not (and have never) needed a warrant to find out the physical address a PO Box is associated with (and the Post Office requires that physical address for you to sign up for a PO Box).
This is the biggest mistake that Bennett Haselton makes in his article: the judge's decision said that an IP address and the associated user is biographical information that one cannot expect to be private from THE STATE, i.e. the government or the police in the carrying out of their normal duties. This is quite distinct from your expectation of privacy from non-governmental entities. I'm on the Do Not Call list, and my number is unlisted, but if someone makes obscene phone calls from my landline, the most that's required to get my phone number is that the recipient file a police report and fax it to their phone company, who then puts a traceback on their line. Once the phone number is obtained, the police find out who it belongs to, and come to the door. No warrant is required.
If Bennett Haselton wanted to attack the premise that an IP address can be used as a reliable method of IDENTIFYING an individual or even a computer, fine then. But I suspect that the case had already nullified that argument in some other way, since it's the most obvious one.
(Then we can get into the fact that his innovative system of soliciting expert testimony is already a tried-and-true component of the justice system... but someone already made that point.)
All in all, by halfway through I was just reading this so I could comment on it and say "I *did* RTFC, and I'd rather hear what a lawyer thinks about it than a mathematician." (IANAL, IAATP [I am a transportation planner], so in his view, I'm qualified to critique lawyers and other experts.)
What is it with people today? You want to know stuff, but can't be bothered reading something that IS a summary, of a lengthy court proceeding involving lots of debate on principles, history, etc.?
It was commentary on the decision, NOT a summary of the decision. I read it, so I know this. You? I'm left wondering.
The Aztecs, and many other Central and South American native civilizations, had a tribute system of government, where you donated your time at your turn to running things. It was fairly effective; after all, when it was your turn, you daren't mess with anyone, because they'd get their turn, too.
The Conquistadores told them they had to have elected leaders. So, they started having elections. It took a while for the Spaniards to figure out that they were just "electing" the guy whose turn it was.
I've ruminated on how you'd do such a tribute system on the scale of a country the size of the United States. It certainly is a compelling idea.