[tor-talk] Questions about NSA monitoring of Tor users.

[Seth David Schoen]

isis writes:

> Dynamism, to the extent that it prevents geolocation, in IPv4 address
> assignment is mostly a thing of the past. I'm usually able to
> accurately track an IPv4 address down to the city, and I'm sure they
> can do much better.

It will be interesting to see what ISPs do with IPv6 assignment policies
and how much they can be influenced about this.

I was thinking of writing a blog post describing how, depending on
what the ISPs do about this, IPv6 could be drastically better than IPv4
for user privacy, or drastically worse.  After all, an end-user could
get anything from an unrecognizably different IPv6 address _per-TCP
connection_ to a single globally unique IPv6 address _per-device
lifetime_.  The latter was originally seriously proposed as the default
way of assigning IPv6 addresses because it would make some kinds of
roaming easier -- using the device EUI-64 directly in the address.

https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4941#section-1.2

When talking to journalists about IP geolocation recently, I've been
using the example of Skyhook Wireless.

http://www.skyhookwireless.com/

They're combining observations from multiple sources, including queries
from mobile devices that are connected to wifi networks, to build
associations between locations and IP addresses that may be down to the
building level.  (Google and Microsoft, at least, also have device
positioning services that make similar kinds of observations.)

-- 
Seth Schoen  <schoen at eff.org>
Senior Staff Technologist                       https://www.eff.org/
Electronic Frontier Foundation                  https://www.eff.org/join
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