For instance on a board like this, if someone wanted to track down a poster could they do it?
And if so, who could do it? Anyone with computer skills? Local police? The FBI?
And, if they can do it legally, how is it done technically?
Thanks.
Well, I’m not sure about the answers to a lot of your questions, esp the legal ones, but the technical side has a lot to do with IP addresses. You’ve probably seen them - funky little numbers in the format like 45.203.85.185 There are about four billion of them in total, and every electronic machine on the internet has to take a unique address. (I think that I’ve heard they’re planning on extending the address structure because at some point we’re going to run out.)
Lots of message boards, for example, will capture what IP address someone’s message came from, and store that, either visibly along with the message, or in a special database that only the admins have access to. Once you have an IP address, you can find out who’s entitled to give that address to computers, (normally the internet service provider) and go from there.
I remember hearing that in the recent file-sharing lawsuits in the US, the RIAA had basically hacked into kazaa far enough to allow them to trace the IP addresses of particular usernames that were online on the kazaa network. Once they had these addresses, the found out the ISPs and got warrants issued by the US courts to get the ISPs to reveal which users had been assigned those IP addresses at those times. (Most big file-sharers use broadband internet, which tends to leave a particular computer at a particular IP address for months at a time.)
Hope this much has been helpful.
The non-technical method is Google. Seriously.
Most people carry there user name the same through out the web. So if you use ‘Plan B’ here, maybe you use it elsewhere (other message boards, online dating sites, etc…). Sure, on the SDMB, you’re anonymous. You may not want family or friends to know you post here, because this board is your online diary. But maybe you post on ‘SomethingAwful.com’ forums. And there, you don’t really care what anyone thinks, so you post more real information. Maybe on that site, you’ve listed you’re Yahoo! profile, but not on the SDMB. People can find you this way.
Example. I post on an online racing forum. On that forum, you’re not aloud to post your ETA’s. But you can bullshit your times. He went on and on about how slow he is. He kept claiming he runs 16’s and how his car was a piece of shit. Basically, he would do this to setup illegal street races and would bluff and try to con slower cars into racing him. I figured he was bs’ing, so I Googled his user name, found him on another message board, which is dedicated to technical issues for cars. He had his car in his sig, with actual ETA (14 something seconds), and Nextel DC#. With that number, and if I was a crazy physco stalker type, all I do is contact my buddy at Nextel, and BAM, I know his address, phone #'s, etc… (Had to do this once, as a friend was robbed by this girl, and she was staying at her friends house. Luckily, we had the friends cell number, but didn’t know where she lived. We didn’t have a last name either, but we found her). So instead, I PM’d everyone he tried to set a race up with, and gave them the link to the other message board, so they wouldn’t get ripped off.
Buy yeah, the IP thing and Google is what you watch out for. And never leave personal information on the net if you don’t want to be caught up for being an ass.