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Publius, RIP?

By Fred von Lohmann
February 24, 2005

In a classic New Yorker cartoon, the caption reads: “On the Internet, no one knows you're a dog.” Not so. Whether you're spouting off your views about the latest episode of “Desperate Housewives” on a fan Web site, complaining about your sinking stock portfolio on a Yahoo message board or, in the case of a Texas man recently, castigating your local politicians for misspending taxpayer dollars, your Internet Service Provider (ISP) knows you're not a dog. And it knows your name, address and telephone number.

Not only does your ISP know who you are, but also the computers you visit on the Internet know who your ISP is. Unless you take preventative measures, any computer you visit online can trace you back to your ISP. This is because each computer on the Internet, including yours, depends on an Internet Protocol number to figure out where to send that Web page you just requested, or that e-mail you just checked. When you log onto the Internet, your ISP assigns your computer an IP number for that session. And IP numbers can easily be traced back to the assigning ISP.

So, if your ISP knows who you are, and every computer you visit on the Internet knows who your ISP is, then it's just a hop, skip and subpoena to connect the dots. If you've said something nasty about a company whose stock price has just cost you your early retirement, or blown the whistle on some corporate illegalities, your IP address leaves a trail of breadcrumbs that leads to your ISP, and thence to your door. (Note that the real “bad guys” of the Internet – the spammers, worm and virus writers, and the like ' have sophisticated methods to “spoof” or hide their IP numbers, so you'll not be catching them this way.)

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