Re: Dear Police
You’re right about getting a warrant. The IP address doesn’t really tell an investigator anything though. For example a ne’er do well may host a proxy website fronted with CloudFlare that grabs illegal content from Tor or whatever and sends it back to the user.
The user is seen connecting to an IP address for CloudFlare. Not really dodgy.
I have a small amount of sympathy with the police etc. They’re stuck between the push for better privacy rights which I agree with, and the pressure for them to nick bad folk, which I also agree with. It’s about striking an appropriate balance (which is what warrants are for). The difficulty they have is that you can’t get a warrant if you don’t know something bad has happened. You need intel. Humint is both expensive and unreliable as a rule.
We as a society just need to have that conversation and decide where we want the balance to be, and what we’re willing to give up to get it (i.e. do we lean more towards privacy > all or more towards criminals being detected and prosecuted?). It’s not happening atm. Governments try to make changes without seeing what the people actually value. Never going to end well...
Biting the hand that feeds IT
