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How Do Police/FBI Find Out Who You Are?

UnknownUnknown
edited June 2011 in Tech & Games
How many different ways are there for an FBI agent or police force to identify who you are, looking but nothing other than an account on Totse for example.

Let's say that Negrophobe admitted to blowing up a church full of nuns and the police were after him. How many different techniques can they use to get his information so that they can go after him?

Obviously there's IP addresses (which can be masked by proxies/TOR) but we don't log those anyway. I suppose they could call up every single ISP and find out who's using Totse, but that wouldn't get them anywhere due to the number of visitors we have each day.

Ideas?
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Comments

  • AmieAmie Regular
    edited June 2011
    They could also look at the time of his posts and ask the ISP of Vineman's hosting which IP's had an active connection to the server at that time - if Vineman would not give them the information, that is. Then just go check out the face behind those IP's - possibily limiting themselves to the ones in proximity of the committed crime to drastically reduce the number of people they have to check out.

    Also, blowing up a church full of nuns - or threatening to do so or planning to do so or funding this act or supporting it in another way or planning to fund / support it - is terrorism, so the patriot act allows "the man" to do basically anything they want. They can take over Vineman's hosting and monitor Negrophobe's account, get his browser and OS signatures, infect him with malware which reveals his location and takes pictures of him trough his webcam, force his email provider to give them access to his account and provide them with his IP's and all his (deleted) messages ...

    In short, if they want to get to him, they probably will. That's one of the reasons nobody should never admit to crimes on the internet.
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  • UnknownUnknown
    edited June 2011
    Wow, that's pretty scary stuff. The malware part is interesting - will a decent setup be able to stop the malware from infecting the computer or will the government be using some super-tech stuff which is undetectable?

    What's so valuable about browser and OS signatures?
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  • AmieAmie Regular
    edited June 2011
    trx100 wrote: »
    Wow, that's pretty scary stuff. The malware part is interesting - will a decent setup be able to stop the malware from infecting the computer or will the government be using some super-tech stuff which is undetectable?

    If for some reason they want to throw piles of money at it, they can come up with pretty sick shit. The Stuxnet worm is a good example: it could use either of 4 different zero-day attacks to invade a computer. It circulated for a couple months before being discovered, during which nobody could do anything about it. It was designed to spread itself while laying low and search for a specific type of PLC in a specific application and disturb the operations of the PLC. It is widely assumed to have been created by Israel / the US / both of them to sabotage Iranian nuclear installations.
    trx100 wrote: »
    What's so valuable about browser and OS signatures?

    A given user's combination of browser, addons and OS versions and settings is often quite unique. It's not enough to find somebody in itself, but it can help narrow the search very fast. You can check it here: http://panopticlick.eff.org/
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  • UnknownUnknown
    edited June 2011
    Very interesting stuff, thanks :) I could talk about this kind of thing all day, it's very cool to think about.
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  • FATTY_MCFUCKFACEFATTY_MCFUCKFACE Regular
    edited June 2011
    Negrophobe wouldn't be stupid enough to blab about the nuns
    he hasn't even told you tryhards, cryhards, and rubes the hooker story
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