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The High Court ordered its first injunction via Twitter on Thursday, saying the social website and micro-blogging service was the best way to reach an anonymous Tweeter who had been impersonating someone.The legal first could have widespread implications for the blogosphere."I think this is a landmark decision to issue a writ via Twitter," said Dr Konstantinos Komaitis of Strathclyde University's law faculty. "You are creating a precedent that people will be able to refer to. It only takes one litigant to open the path for others to follow," Komaitis, a lecturer in IT and Telecommunications told Reuters.
Mack.
I mean how can you validate the authenticity.
now your anonymity might be gone
It's very difficult to be truly anonymous online. There is a thin veneer over most people's anonymity which can be broken, whether that be through IPs, ISPs record keeping, services, such as Twitter's record keeping, etc. The authorities would eventually crack the veneer.
You might think that using a mobile to connect to the net would be harder to track, to an extent it is but there are still plenty of clues to follow. If your phone is on a contract then law enforcement will be able to get your full details from your cell network.
A pre pay phone is still not entirely anonymous. If you registered the phone they have you, even if you didn't every phone broadcasts info to the network including fairly accurate location details and the phones 16 digit id code (IMEI number). This number alone will provide details on any previous contract details for the phone, where it was sold and a lot more.
In general the only people who have anything to worry about are those who are on the wrong side of the law. Thankfuly anonymous web access is getting more and more difficult, although still possible.
Mack.
Drive into a residential 'hood scanning for an open wifi.
Fake your MAC address and don't use that computer anywhere else.
Don't stay long enough to get the cops to notice you.
Go next door to a hotel/restaurant/coffee place/ that has free wifi, fake your MAC address, don't use that computer anywhere else, make sure to stay out of the security cameras. There are ways to stay far beyond the normal range of wifi, so you can find a lonely enough spot not to get noticed all that fast.
The cops will find an innocent family/ stupid business owner to question as long as they want.
The real bad guys typically hack a computer in e.g. Russia, use that to break into a machine in China and then do their work using stolen credit cards ...
Finding the bad guy when the Russian nor Chinese cops will cooperate with most other western nations is a real problem. Those who do get caught are overconfident, or plainly ignorant. And the politicans/press etc. will just claim "China did it" or "Russian mafia did it", cause that works for them and their agenda.
This weakness is well known, I read a report a while back that proposed all open WiFi access points to log all activity. This makes sense because the bad guys are more likely to use this approach as opposed to an isp connection.
Having. Said that if the bad guy spoofed/changed his mac address the logs are as good as useless for identifying the culprit. It would still be useful to an extent by being able to see exactly what they where doing.
Mack.
Don't just think the speed (or lack of it) from your local cops, think Internationally: "interpol". It takes many months to get a stupid fax across.
And if all you see is an AES256 bit encrypted tunnel ? Well maybe the NSA or their counterparts around the world have broken it, but odds are they have not. And if they have, they will not risk revealing it's broken for a "simple" case.
