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Comment by mordocai | Hacker News Reader

I would argue that ip address is trivial to falsify (though certainly not as trivial as an anonymous phone call).

You can send packets with a fake source IP, but you won't get any response back, so it's of extremely limited utility. If there's traffic back and forth between two IPs going through ISP infrastructure, then it's a safe bet that it's the real deal.

Or I send you a word document with a macro that installs a reverse tunnel allowing me to push my traffic through your machine.

A search warrant is not a conviction. It simply allows police to collect more evidence.

"collect more evidence" means they take your hardware or other property that they want and you will not get it back for many years. Even if there is no criminal charge. If its computer hardware that was taken, it will be obsolete by the time you get it back.

> to collect more evidence

..., break down your front door in the middle of the night, shoot your dog or someone from your household, throw in flash grenades... You know simply ruin your life.

A search warrant, if executed in certain ways, can be very destructive in itself.

That's why we don't issue them without probable cause. Probable cause doesn't mean "proof beyond a reasonable doubt"; if it did, we could dispense with the pesky trials.

Those pesky trials are dispensed with in something like 90%+ of the cases in the US. The accused just wind up accepting a plea bargain.

Some might argue that that's how it should be, and is an example of the effectiveness of prosecutors, who save the state a lot of trouble and money in trying people who clearly are guilty by their own admission.

Others might call it a travesty of justice, and a mockery of the judicial process and the Constitution of the United States.

Remember the case of Aaron Schwartz.

I don't remember probable cause being the issue in that case. Do you remember differently?

The problem in the Aaron Swartz case was that MIT IT employees decided to make a federal case out of a trespass event with zero property damage, and MIT refused to release the names of those people. Subsequently there were many other sins of omission. MIT's senior leadership could have come out against the prosecution, for example. The enablers and excuse-makers disgust me.

My point was about the lack of trials for the overwhelming majority of defendants in the US. Schwartz's case was a well known example of that.

How so? He didn't take a plea bargain, so it seems like a poor example of defendants taking plea bargains.

He didn't take a plea bargain because even that was too onerous! He killed himself rather than face either a trial or plea.

It's also a good example as Schwart'z case is widely considered a blatant prosecutorial abuse of power, and symptomatic of a broken judicial system.

It's "Swartz", by the way.

But we do issue them based on things that unbiased experts would never call probable cause.

The word "probability" is right there in the term. I don't think you're going to find a lot of experts that will look a the data on how likely residential IP addresses are to correspond to actions at their addresses and say that the correlation is weak.

Yes but there are plenty of cases where police departments aren't even bothering to get the service address from the ISP. Look at the case of the farm in Kansas or the house in Atlanta, The police don't have some independent source testifying that that IP address was in use by a customer at that service address, they're literally just using a geolocation service and raiding wherever the marker lands on the map.

This is the one thing that irks me the most, I don't expect law enforcement to understand the technical side of things but this is just a complete failure to do good old fashioned police work. If a judge was asked to sign a search warrant predicated around the results of a homemade drug test tutorial on Wikihow there's no chance that they would ever consider granting it yet when the same thing is asked in regards to an IP address somehow that passes muster.

At a minimum, police should be required to contact the IANA to figure out which AS an IP belongs to and then contact the AS to figure out what the service address is for the customer. Academia is built around citing any kind of source information, why is that too much to ask for from law enforcement?

Ideally, law enforcement would contact IANA to get the AS, look and verify that that AS was the only one advertising that IP block at the time in question, get the serial number of the modem in question from the AS if the subscriber is using a DOCSIS modem, go to the service address and confirm that the modem is actually present at the service address by doing a disconnect at the road, and then execute the warrant. I get that most of this is pie in the sky wishful thinking, but omitting any of those steps could result in raiding an innocent person needlessly and a lot of those steps could be executed concurrently. Heck, you could also throw in looking for signs that the IP address in question is being used as a Tor node or any other simple proxy and sniffing wireless traffic and trying to correlate the timing of wireless frames to the traffic from the modem in question. You could even do the wireless sniffing at the same time you go out to verify where a modem is on the node.

Even though this would be extra work for law enforcement, wouldn't it be worth it many times over if it just saves a small proportion of innocent citizens from a dangerous police raid?

To ensure that that is actually the case, police department should be held financially liable for any damaged caused during searches and seizures.

Like this? https://go.mpdconline.com/GO/3738000.pdf

That makes sense to me too.

Or it's a VPN.

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