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| Home Front: Tech |
| NSA gets patent to track Internet users |
| 2005-09-24 |
| The National Security Agency has obtained a patent on a way of finding an Internet user's geographic location. Patent 6,947,978, granted Tuesday, describes a way to discover someone's physical location by comparing it to a "map" of Internet addresses with known locations, CNET News.com reported Wednesday. The NSA did not respond Wednesday to an interview request from CNET News.com, and the patent description talks only generally about the technology's potential uses. It says the geographic location of Internet users could be used to "measure the effectiveness of advertising across geographic regions" or flag a password that "could be noted or disabled if not used from or near the appropriate location, CNET News.com said." The NSA's patent relies on measuring the latency, or time lag, between computers exchanging data, of "numerous" locations on the Internet and building a "network latency topology map." Then the Internet address to be identified could be looked up on the map by measuring how long it takes known computers to connect to the unknown one, CNET News.com said. DoubleClick has licensed geo-location technology to deliver location-dependent advertising, and Visa has signed a deal to use the concept to identify possible credit card fraud in online orders. |
| Posted by:Anonymoose |
| #4 Why exactly would the NSA tip their hand on having this capability by seeking a patent? Are they a business or a spy agency? Perhaps they figure the bad guys already know and take counter-measures so they might as well see a resident engineer taken care of financially? If so, they overestimate the skills of many a jihadi. Or perhaps are they just looking to make the jihadi's more paranoid and slow their ops? |
| Posted by: Zpaz 2005-09-24 18:10 |
| #3 I change my nick alot. |
| Posted by: Greg von Trippin 2005-09-24 17:31 |
| #2 Easily defeated if you know the right way to go about it. If needed, I have a proxy that drops all packets from them and other ad companies anyway, and adds a random 100-400ms delay in the packets at the front plane of the router. Thats in addition to any filtering I choose to do at the client end on my own land, relays, etc. For here I dont bother. But if it became important, no problem putting that stuff in. |
| Posted by: Oldspook 2005-09-24 14:03 |
| #1 Hey, Boris! They'll track you down no matter what you do to hide now. Posting from the library won't help you now. The NSA is good. Real good. And remember, what they haven't declassified yet prolly works even better. |
| Posted by: N guard 2005-09-24 12:12 |