A prominent Senate Democrat on Wednesday said federal and local police should use custom software to monitor peer-to-peer networks for illegal activity, and he wants to spend $1 billion in tax dollars to help make that happen.
At an afternoon Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing about child exploitation on the Internet, Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.) said he was under the impression it's "pretty easy to pick out the person engaged in either transmitting or downloading violent scenes of rape, molestation" simply by looking at file names. He urged use of those techniques by investigators to help nab the most egregious offenders.
Oh, so THAT'S what Biden meant when he said Democrats were stronger on national security. Silly me, I thought he meant about IMPORTANT issues. Sure Joe, let's blow another $1 billion dollars getting those pesky kids downloading the latest Metallica tunes. I'm sure your office has nothing better to do then to bust a 14 year old kid in his mom's basement.
Based on Waters' statements to the committee, the system appears to work like this: Investigators log onto peer-to-peer file-sharing networks as any other person would and search for files containing certain keywords that are likely to indicate child pornography is involved. Then they download the files--frequently videos, sometimes as long as 20 to 30 minutes, with names like "children kiddy underage illegal.mpg" and much more obscene--to their own machines. They're able to use the Fairplay software to obtain the IP address of the file's sender and, in some cases, display its geographic location in map form.
Once armed with an IP address and date and time of the download, investigators can subpoena the Internet service provider for more information, such as name and address of the subscriber who was assigned it at that moment. "It's not necessarily the suspect but it tells us the physical location to start," Waters said. (He didn't say whether any wiretaps were conducted to monitor ongoing file swapping.)
Investigators use the IP addresses to keep track of offenders on a "daily" basis, Waters told CNET News.com during a break at the hearing. But in about half its cases, for purposes of longer-term tracking, the software captures "unique serial numbers" from the person's computer and keeps a tally of how many allegedly illicit files that particular user is trading.
Waters provided the committee with a chart that said, for example, law enforcement had "seen" one user in Pennsylvania exchanging those files 2,792 times, one New Jersey user swapping them 1,182 times, and so on. It wasn't clear whether the so-called serial number corresponded to IP address, P2P username, or something else, and Waters wouldn't elaborate.
"It's unique to the computer, that's as far as I'll go," Waters added, saying he didn't want to divulge more details that suspects could use to circumvent detection. "We're able to get it when they're transferring child pornography."
Wow, that's your hard earned tax dollars at work there people. Their "unique serial number" won't be possibly cracked at all right? I mean, Microsoft spent untold amounts of money to protect Windows XP with it's Product Activation crap, that used a "unique serial number", and look, it was cracked in short order. And do you honestly expect people to name illegal files something stupid like "children kiddy underage illegal.mpg"? Really? Is that the extent of your vast computer knowledge?
To tell then, what is u804.iso? Is it the latest version of Ubuntu 8.04, or is it simply a renamed file to get around your technically superior ways of finding kiddie porn?
Make no mistake, this isn't one of those "think of the children" type of things. It's a "I'm at the mercy of Hollywood studios who help bankroll my campaign" and "I'll spy on you in the name of the children" things.
You can't stop piracy and illegal files on the internet. IT CAN'T BE DONE, and you're trying some sneaky shit to get some additional power that you don't deserve.
Travis
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