Could this spell the end of ATS anonymity?

Problem -
Movie and Music industry is being ripped off by P2P file sharing
Reaction -
Outrage that anonymous users cannot be tracked
Solution -
Force websites to keep logs and turn them over when ordered to

This message appeared on the front page of www.torrentspy.com recently:

Hello Friends of TorrentSpy,

This message is to inform you about recent efforts by the motion picture studios to shut down TorrentSpy. As you may know, in February 2006 the major movie studios and their Washington lobby, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), filed a lawsuit against TorrentSpy and other search engines.

We guess that hiring hackers and turning a blind eye to identity theft is not enough for the movie studios and the MPAA. Now they want to know who you are, what you search for, and what you download. In short, it is the view of the movie studios that websites should not allow anonymous use and your activity on the Internet - anywhere - is their business.

The really scarry thing is that if we lose this court battle, the movie studios will be able to go after any search engine or website and force them to collect data about YOU. It is not an exaggeration to say that losing this fight is a nail in the Internet's coffin.

We have spent the last year challenging their relentless campaign against the 1st Amendment and personal privacy laws Worldwide. We have succeeded in delaying the court order to turn on logs while we appeal it. TorrentSpy will not create logs of what you do on the site without your consent.

While we use Google Analytics for website statistics, TorrentSpy servers have never tracked your IP Address, the searches you make, or how you use the site. We are dedicated to your privacy and we are fighting for your rights!

Now, whether P2P file sharing and Piracy is right or wrong is a totally different debate, I want to bring up the spectre of something that could affect ATS users if this campaign by the MPAA succeeds.

If legislation can be brought through to allow anyone with enough of an excuse to order a website to turn over it's logs, how will that harm the effectiveness of being anonymous through avatars and nicknames here at ATS.

If such an order could be made, how much info could be turned over? What does this site know about people?

While I myself have nothing to hide and have never made any posts which could get me in trouble, I worry that if legislation like they are proposing could get through then anybody with any real and important information would have to do some serious work to keep their identity hidden.

I would like to hear other members thoughts on this and whether people here view it as just desserts for the P2P community or another step down the path to the death of the internet.

What I don't get about this is what authority does a US court have against torrentspy which i believe is based in the Netherlands?

From what i have read torrentspy will block off access to the US before they do this.

The gov't can already spy on what websites you visit via the patriot act and can illegally trace every site you have been to by various means. There is a thread around here somewhere about that. It showed how to check to see if someone was tracing your activity, and it turned out that a lot of ATS members were actually being traced. This is getting rediculous though. You can't do anything online w/o people watching what you are doing. Its just creepy.

Originally posted by Saturn
The gov't can already spy on what websites you visit via the patriot act and can illegally trace every site you have been to by various means. There is a thread around here somewhere about that. It showed how to check to see if someone was tracing your activity, and it turned out that a lot of ATS members were actually being traced ...

Does anyone have a link to this post? I'm most interested

I presume that there is no anonymity anywhere, not even on the internet.

I know that ATS can block access to the site by IP address, so a means to track IPs must not be hard to implement.

Originally posted by TheDeviant
Does anyone have a link to this post? I'm most interested

Here ya go

a disturbing trend that continues to pop up on my traces, that i am not seeing in this thread, is:

7 9 ms 7ms 8ms gar8.cgcil.ip.att.net [12.122.79.85]
8 31ms 32ms 32ms tbr1.cgcil.ip.att.net [12.122.85.98]
9 30ms 30ms 30 ms tbr1.n54ny.ip.att.net [12.122.10.1]
10 28ms 28ms 29ms gbr6.n54ny.ip.att.net [12.122.11.14]
11 29ms 29ms 29ms ar4.n54ny.ip.att.net [12.123.214.61]


i live in chicago and am very curious of this "n54ny.ip" i keep getting. any ideas? this was the tracert nsa.gov search.

That is scary, the NSA is National Security Agency...

And thanks for the link

Originally posted by Saturn
The gov't can already spy on what websites you visit via the patriot act and can illegally trace every site you have been to by various means. There is a thread around here somewhere about that. It showed how to check to see if someone was tracing your activity, and it turned out that a lot of ATS members were actually being traced. This is getting rediculous though. You can't do anything online w/o people watching what you are doing. Its just creepy.

Actually, with the passage of the Patriot Act, the gov't legally can trace site activity should it be a "threat to national security." The Patriot Act increased the Feds' power to conduct cybersurveillance.

The MPAA shouldn't be allowed to track us though. Although the federal crime of movie piracy could be one avenue the government would take semantics for a walk down....

Originally posted by LooseLipsSinkShips
a disturbing trend that continues to pop up on my traces, that i am not seeing in this thread, is:

7 9 ms 7ms 8ms gar8.cgcil.ip.att.net [12.122.79.85]
8 31ms 32ms 32ms tbr1.cgcil.ip.att.net [12.122.85.98]
9 30ms 30ms 30 ms tbr1.n54ny.ip.att.net [12.122.10.1]
10 28ms 28ms 29ms gbr6.n54ny.ip.att.net [12.122.11.14]
11 29ms 29ms 29ms ar4.n54ny.ip.att.net [12.123.214.61]


i live in chicago and am very curious of this "n54ny.ip" i keep getting. any ideas? this was the tracert nsa.gov search.

10 * 2548 ms * ffm-b6-link.telia.net [213.248.68.193]
11 * * * Превышен интервал ожидания для запроса.
12 * 663 ms 1432 ms ldn-bb2-link.telia.net [80.91.249.12]
13 1685 ms 1516 ms 1839 ms nyk-bb2-pos7-0-0.telia.net [213.248.65.210]
14 439 ms 666 ms 2670 ms nyk-b1-link.telia.net [213.248.83.66]
15 748 ms 1107 ms 1776 ms 192.205.34.53
16 2527 ms 1952 ms 2032 ms tbr2.n54ny.ip.att.net [12.122.105.90]
17 2875 ms 2661 ms 598 ms gbr5.n54ny.ip.att.net [12.122.11.26]
18 1822 ms 2279 ms 2909 ms ar4.n54ny.ip.att.net [12.123.214.57]
19 2981 ms 1510 ms * 12.126.221.94

I get that [n54ny] too, though I'm not even inside the US... I think it's the actual route to nsa.gov..

Sorry for the offtop.

Okay maybe some background into what tracert is before we begin.

Tracert is a program you command that actually tracks hops across routers. so when you see the next line down from the first one, that's considered a 'hop'. It does it three times and displays how long it took. (Masta G is running on DSL I see, with his hop times.)

So each line also gives us the name of the router and a general location for it. So say, you start in florida you'd see you exit your router (yes, you actually ping your modem/router) you'd go to the first hop, then to the next, then to the next until you reach the server the web site is on. So a lot of what people are afraid of is each of the hops.

As far as ip addresses. Everybody is broadcasting their ip address loud and clear as they hop across the internet. So to log IP addresses they can just add a program that notices it. (Every web site does this though as it wants to make sure it's a legitimate computer. I know a lot of forums that actually log your IP address and broadcasts it on the web site.)

Oh and if you ever get an iP address whois.net will take you directly to their ISP and quite possibly their backbone provider if you dig far enough.

As far as the n54ny.ip.att.net goes that just means that the router is located in the 54th router of ATT in NY somewhere.

www.arin.com (another good search for IP addys) gave me this (because you supplied the IP address as well)

AT&T WorldNet Services ATT (NET-12-0-0-0-1)
12.0.0.0 - 12.255.255.255
AT&T Worldnet Services ATTSVI-12-122-0-0 (NET-12-122-0-0-1)
12.122.0.0 - 12.123.255.255

So it belongs to AT&T. You're hopping over to New York somewhere before reaching the NSA.gov site.

Doing a tracert myself, to NSA I checked. Apparently after an x ammount of hops they actually block your tracert. (this is fine, if you don't want your server logged down tons of sites do this, aol does this for instance.) But apparently we're all going through NY. So something tells me that their server is in washington! More in a minute!

Okay looking over my hops again I found one before my tracert got blocked.

I checked the IP address over on arin.net and found out it belonged to AT&T and a router belonging to LINGUALISTEK. About all I could find on the web site is that they hire minorities, women and other various other things. I'll do a little more research on them later to see what I come up with. (that's just their web site) and they don't mention any of the specific projects they run. And because this is a conspracy/etc. forum, no I see no government involvement.

Okay so NSA is also run through the same LINGUALISTEK thing I just noticed on my tracert it gave the IP address of the web site!12.110.110.204 they're a business so nine times out of ten this is also a static IP address (Until their leasing expires.)

Maybe more info later... Hmm... much to thinkn about...

Originally posted by arnold_vosloo
What I don't get about this is what authority does a US court have against torrentspy which i believe is based in the Netherlands?

From what i have read torrentspy will block off access to the US before they do this.

The servers are based in the Netherlands but the owners of Torrentspy are Americans and live in America.

If the owners moved to Canada, the MPAA wouldn't have a leg to stand on by while the owners are in the US, the MPAA can bribe the lawmakers to do whatever they want.

Anyone on forums like this has got to assume that he is under surveillance. The Echelon system of tracking keywords on the web must go into overload when it runs into this traffic. Here is a link to an excellent French documentary about the system.

video.google.ca...

There is a complementary video in English but I can't find a link to it. It's not the same film but it covers a lot of the same territory. A Canadian whistleblower features prominently in the english language video.

I remember joking with a friend of mine once about Carnivore and Echelon type surveillance and finished by signing my email: bomb, al quaida, terrorist, subversion etc. I haven't been arrested yet, but I don't doubt there is a file on me somewhere.

Presumably when the keywords show up on the web, the text is read in full, before they send in the clowns. It is interesting to note though, for the history buffs, that when Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau was having a problem with a couple of political kidnappings in Quebec in the 1970's, he RETROACTIVELY made it illegal to be a member of certain separatist organizations in Quebec, ordered the army into the streets of Montreal and had about 600 people arrested, including a lot of media and academic personalities.

We, all of us are only a stroke of the pen away from that situation. Be careful what you say on the web.

The English language video about Echelon is called "Echelon The Most Secret". A Google Video search and a YouTube search failed to turn the video up. It might have been yanked off the web. Maybe a torrant search would turn it up.

[edit on 16-6-2007 by ipsedixit]

[edit on 16-6-2007 by ipsedixit]

Originally posted by ipsedixit
We, all of us are only a stroke of the pen away from that situation. Be careful what you say on the web.

From what I understand, there is something called the Constitution.

In it, there is this thing called the first amendment.

It reads something like, "You have the right to say whatever the hell you want without repercussion."

I understand the Patriot Act allows the government to view and listen to anything and everything now (not that they weren't doing that already...NSA/CIA/FBI wiretapping anyone?).

However, if I were to watch what I say I would be giving in to the fear mongering of our government.

I have never and will never watch what I say.

I am a US citizen and darn proud to have the Constitution to back me up.

I will never be politically correct and if that means I get thrown in a REX 84 concentration camp and poisoned in a gas chamber, then so be it.

At least I will die with my freedoms intact (well what is left of them).

While that may sound cynical, I will do all in my power to remain as free as I am able to.

If that means moving out to the country, then sign me up for the next hay ride to Texas.

I hear they got some great farmland.