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Comment by JoshTriplett | Hacker News Reader

> give us the guest list and we'll cross check and find the guy

An entire guest list is still a broader fishing expedition than should normally be permitted. Warrants should be much more targeted than that. (Of course, many companies seem happy to give overly broad information without even requiring a warrant...)

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A guest list on a single day seems pretty fine grained if you looking for someone who was there on that day.

Im not sure how they would get much more fine grained than that without already knowing the answer ahead of time.

You have the IP address and the time. For many hotels, that'd give you a specific room number and guest.

With IPv4 there's zero chance of that. At most, you could get all the people who were using [Gmail] around that time. With IPv6, mayyybe, but that assumes the hotel does as much data collection as possible and does it correctly.

Assuming the hotel had customer specific login info and the person you are looking for was using it, sure.

The IP address on hand is probably the hotel's public address used for NAT, especially in 2012. This means you'd need to have full NAT logs + source port + something like a captive portal setup that forces the user to identify the room to be able to tie (externalIp, sourcePort) to (user, room). The captive portal type isn't unheard of for hotels, even in 2012, but the NAT logs... it's no surprise they had to ask for the room list.

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