Say I’m a psycho killer and I decide I want to share my crazy with the world.
I set up a web cam that will allow me to stream video from my basement and I start sending out live webcasts of me torturing and killing my victims.
Assuming that there’s no identifying information in the background of the video, how easy is it for the cops to figure out where I am?
The cops are already on their way.
I guess that depends on what you did to hide your trail. If you are running the web server on your home computer from the IP address assigned to you by your cable company which was set up at your residence by the cable guy between the hours of 11am and 4pm. Pretty easy – they just get all of the information about the IP address from the cable company.
If you are using a proxy in an Eastern Bloc nation, though…
To oversimplify a lot, you can always find out someone’s location. The trick is those “proxies” don’t give you true anonymity, what they are giving you is “effective anonymity.”
First of all you could send out your streaming video in parts and then have them recombined. You route the individual parts through various proxies who route them through other proxies and this is done tens of thousands of times.
Then they’re recombined to produce an image.
Bascially for someone to find you they go to the first ISP find out who owns that. They get that record and move to the next ISP, find out the owner get that. Then go on to the next ISP and so on
As you can see if you route something through thousands of servers it makes it so difficult to find you, people won’t bother. This doesn’t mean it isn’t possible to find you, it just makes it harder.
If you’re actually killing someone, every single ISP is gonna co-operate with the police very quickly and the process would speed along without any delay. If you’re downloading an illegal copy of the Simpsons, a some ISPs probably will say “I can’t be bothered without a court order.” That causes delays.
But murder, no one is gonna withhold info that would lead to a killer’s capture.
It’s really not difficult to trace things on the Internet, the idea is to make it so difficult using routing and encryption that it just isn’t worth the effort to do it. Remember even if you use a very strong encryption SOMEONE has the key to it. If they didn’t what’s the point of making something coding it and then sending it out so that no one could ever read it. It’s worthless in that form.
Of course when they finally trace it to your location, all they’re going to find when they break down the door is a wireless router in a rented apartment in a seedy neighborhood where the landlord never got any tenant information… Then they’ll broaden the search to find out who was accessing the router, but you’ll have moved by then anyway.
Maybe I watch too many movies…
Markxxx I have a difficult time believing that a country not already working closely with US police would issue orders to the ISPs for logging information in a timely fashion. If it is weeks or months after the event in question logs can be overwritten or not kept in the first place.
I also disagree that they can easily get past the first proxy. In general proxies are doing proxing for many people at the same time. Unless the proxy machine keeps logs of which ingoing stream matches which outgoing stream. The ISP servicing the proxy machine will now give you hundreds of possible connections. People that run proxies tend to not keep such logs on ideological grounds. If you jump trough a few proxy machines the number of possible sources for the video is astronomical
What if you’re using other people’s computers to unknowingly do the streaming? You plant the trojan, which has a part of the video and program instructions to stream it at a certain time, in combination with the other parts on other infected computers. After the streaming the trojan destroys all traces of its existence from each computer. Would that work? (Please tell me if I’m talking out of my posterior here, I don’t know much about this stuff.)
Ya, and it just occurred to me that if you went wardriving the chances of being able to be tracked are so minute that they could be considered statistically insignificant…
ETA: Wardriving meaning taking your laptop with its WiFi and driving around until you found an unsecured network to connect to.
Nonsense. If you’re using something like Tor, there’s a good chance that several of the intermediate hops don’t have logs they could use to help out the police even if they wanted to.
The downside to proxies is that they’re often slow. I haven’t used Tor in a couple of years, but it could be painful just accessing a website with it at times. Even when things were working fast, the relays would sometimes change and all of a sudden I’d be bouncing things through a 14.4 dialup connection in Latvia or something. I would be surprised if there’s anything that could handle live streaming video. Some proxies can kick you off for using too much bandwidth.
Pre-recorded video would be easier. You could use Tor to connect to a proxy chain to upload it to a website, or use an anonymous remailer system that allows encryption at every hop, if any are still around, to email it to CNN. It’s best to route anything through foreign countries that aren’t very cooperative with the US. The FBI isn’t going to get a search warrant to a computer in Iran as easily as one in Canada.
Of course you’re doing this all from a random wifi connection across town on a stolen laptop that you chain to a block of cement and drop into the Bering Sea when you’re done.
Then you get caught by some stupid mistake that isn’t related to technology. A taillight out on the way to bury the body, or leaving “murder_plan.txt” open on the desktop computer when the cleaning lady comes by.