INTERNET GEO-LOCATION TECHNOLOGY
John Paul Jones, 2007
In 1989, as recorded in his book "The Cuckoo's Egg", Clifford
Stoll, an astronomer at Lawrence Berkley Lab, managed to
trace the location of a computer hacker located in Hannover
Germany who had been breaking into computer systems in the
United States. Despite the hacker's method of using
intermediary computers to cover his tracks, Stoll somehow
managed, with the help of the FBI, to trace the
hacker's location to a computer at the University of Bremen.
This would seem to suggest that any locational anonymity that
may exist on the Internet exists only because the authorities
typically don't care enough to geo-locate any particular cyber
surfer. Yet, given the right resources, it's evidently
possible to find the exact location of the computer from
which a data-packet originated.
Based on this, we might
infer that it's possible to automate the process of
geographically locating
the source computer. At any rate, that's the assumtion
upon which the hypothetical TROLL Cam
system's internet geo-location theory was based. But
is it really possible to automatically identify the location
of a web surfer's computer? To some extent, yes.
In the late 1990s, Marc Knobel, a French Jew, found Nazi
hate sites on AOL and threatened a public relations war
unless the offending sites were blocked. AOL closed the
sites. As everybody should know by now, AOL is not your
typical ISP. Located in Washington D.C. suburbia, AOL has
it's finger on political realities that Silicon Valley
Internet companies like Yahoo would no doubt like to ignore,
and evidently, judging by the ubiquity of AOL's distribution
software CDs, which are pushed at FedEx Kinkos, CompUSA, and
seemingly inumerable other retailers, not to mention the
U.S. Post Office, a federal agency of all places--AOL is
well-connected and well-liked by the powers that supposedly
see all and be all. In any case, AOL eargerly complied with
Knobel's complaint.
In 2000, Knobel hoped that a similar threat against Yahoo
would yeild like results. His hopes were dashed, however.
Yahoo, the brain child of two Stanford graduate students,
Jerry Yan and David Filo, evidently adopted the politically
incorrect view that only an un-American Net Nazi would seek
to stiffle free speach on the Internet by appealing to
restrictive French hate-crime laws. In any case, Yahoo did
nothing to remmove the offensive content, perhaps giving
Knobel and company the sense that they were being told to
take a long hike on a short peer. It's hard to know how
Knobel's Gestapo-Stopers might view Yahoo's unwillingness to
jump at the opportunity to remmove offensive speach from
cyberspace.
In any case, Knobel was not disuaded or detered. On April
11, 2000, he sued Yahooo in a French court on behalf of the
International League Against Racism and Anti-Semitism and
others, who claimed in court that Yahoo's actions violated
the French laws banning the import or trafficing of Nazi
regalia in France. In a surprise ruling on May 22, 2000, the
French court ruled that Yahoo was indeed obligated to
prevent French web surfers from accessing the
France-Forbidden Yahoo-based Nazi auctions sites on
yahoo.com. Yahoo claimed such filtering was not feasible, a
technological impossibility: "Asking us to filter access to
our sites according to the nationality of surfers is very
naive."
Yahoo's impossiblity argument was based on prevalant but
erroneous assumptions about the architecture of the
internet, not the least of which is that the Net's
architecture was written in stone, a theory since disproved
by, among other things, China's Golden Shield system. Uncle
Sam it was, not God, who ordained that there be 13 root
servers under the control of the U.S. government, and after
the 9-1l terror attack, some of Uncle Sam's employees in
the FBI were the first to suggest the unthinkable: namely,
that the Internet architecture be changed fundamentally,
thus suggesting that perhaps Uncle Sam knew what "We the
People" were programmed to know not.
Judge Gomez gave Yahoo two months to find out how to block
French surfers, during which time Cryil Houri, another
French Jew, the founder of a new American firm called
InfoSplit, contacted the plaintiff's lawyer, Stephane Lilti,
and told him that he had created an allegedly new technology
that could identify and screen Internet content on the basis
of its geographical source. It's reported that Houri, a
pioneer in Internet geo-location technology, concluded in
1999 that the conventional wisdom about the Internet and
territory was erroneous. But the idea of locating internet
surfers in real space was not new. Since the early 1990s,
Internet firms tried to discover the geographical identity
of their customers.
Although Internet IP addresses do not direcly divulge the
user's physical location, the information packets that make
up Internet communications travel via computers whose
location in real space is easy to identify. A "tracing"
packet can repeort the list of computers through which a
communication travels, thus permiting computers to determine
the path that the packet traveled and identifying the
closest source node, the computer closest to the computer
from which the packet originated--usually servers of certain
organizations, such as universities, quite often commercial
ISPs. When cross checked against other IP databases that
offer different data about the geographical locations and
analyzed by sophisiticated computer algorithms, the location
of Internet users can be determined with over 99 percent
accuracy at the country level, but with less accuracy at the
state and county level. A web operator can use this system
to automatically identify the location of computer users
seeking access to a web page and can display content that's
customized according to the location of the web surfer. The
process is invisible to the internet visitor.
Further, with AAA (adaptive antenna array) technology, which
greatly increases the bandwith of wireless communications
systems, wireless internet activity will doubtless increase,
thus making it possible to identify the exact location of an
internet user in real time using the same triagulation
techniques used to pinpoint cell phone users. Wi-Fi will
make it easier to track people geographically through radio
signals and satellites while making Internet activity on
portable devices, such as web-enabled phones or wear-cams,
much more pervasive, thus allowing easier geographical
tracking of more web users through the Global Positioning
Systems (GPS) that are built into such devices, in which
case all the hype about the anonimity of Internet access
and the untrackability of web surfers (via their computers)
in real space in real time seems a red herring.
SOURCES:
* Cookoo's Egg, Clifford Stoll, 1989, Pocket Books
* Net Spies, Andrew Gauntlett, 1999, Vision Paperbacks
* The Fugitive Game, Jonathan Littman, Little Brown & Company
* Who Controls the Internet, 2006, Tim Wu, Oxford University Press
* "Computer Rebels Seek Data Haven", John Markoff, NYT, June 4, 2000