Whats in an IP address..?

In this day and age where certain organisations would like to know everything there is about a person I wonder what can be read from a computer IP address. It is just a question I want to throw at this forum...you know...being a conspiracy site jampacked with tons of paranoid people..ha,ha. I was wondering about this IP-address because sometimes things are not what they seem.

Here in The Netherlands everybody has a BSN (burger service nummer) which can be translated as social security number... much like the number every person living in the USA has. Many people do not know what personal data (government) organisations can access with this number.

Here in my country the government has been linking as much as possible there is to know about a person with this number. Things like health Insurance, identification data, driver licence and what not. Btw, do people in the UK, Germany and Scandinavia have something simular...I suspect much so...besides being praktical for administration a typical NWO thing.

So what about this IP address..? I am not very familiar with the ins and outs of a computer but I can imagine that a government wants to link stuff with this number. All I can make of it is that an address tells something about location and identification.

Is that true..? Is it possible to ascertain a persons name and address with this IP-number? How does that work and what else can be discovered about a person with this number? Can we expect other personal data to be linked with this number in the future? And how save, how well protected is it?

Thx for reading and contributing any info.

Its possible to locate an IP's location but not its owner (the ISP wont give out personal info), but of course there are ways around certain things.

Most IP numbers are only assigned [randomly] to the router in the house, all other computers on the house network will have internal IP and will all appear to be from that router. So if you have a big family or live with a large shared house, it would be easier to hack the PC directly and find out who it is rather than trying to trace everything using sites like WHOIS.net

reply to post by zatara


I used to fix computers back when windows 2000 was new. IP addresses are not permanently affixed to any person, computer, or even physical location; for the most part. Some big corporation servers have designated IP addresses, but most are dynamically assigned, meaning the computer assigns the best fitting IP address. The workstation or company then broadcasts that it is known as that IP address as well as how you know it company.com . Then the .com is linked to the address.

Also, not all IP addresses are global or available everywhere. Some are only local IP addresses and the workstations in this example all share one global IP address. The local IP address can not be seen on the internet, only the global IP address can. Some internet providers do want some monitoring and assign a static, or never changing, IP address to an account. Then the logs that link the IP address to reading ATS four times a day can be backtracked.

There is a hardware address that is linked to your network card. It is the MAC address. It identifies you similar to an IP address.

reply to post by zatara


The location of an IP address is usally only linked to a certain country due to "blocks" of addresses being assigned to ISP's so that they can give their customers a single, unique IP address. Obviously the ISP's know who and where you are as you have made a contract with them for their services. THeoretically, no individual can pinpoint your location with the IP address, but, assuming agencies such as the NSA, GCHQ and AIVD (Dutch Intelligence Services) have black boxes installed at the ISP's (DPI boxes or deep-packet inspection) then they will always be able to discover who you are, possibly only with a court order but that last part is doubtful imho.

There are internet sites that can search for the location of your IP address. When I test mine, it says I'm in a completely different location in Holland, which is fine by me. I am under no illusions however that they could "find" me anytime they wanted to. Hope it helps!And in contrast to what the poster above me states, in Holland, many consumer addresses are static, meaning you keep the IP address always or until you stop the contract. At least, for ADSL connections that is the case with my provider (XS4All)

reply to post by zatara

Whats in an IP address..?

"An IP address is the digital and cibernetic fingerprint of a computer."

Without an ID card you don't have a legal address.

you can add certain things that make it look like you are in another country [hotspotshield] is one i can think off but add 2 and that will throw them i hope

Why not use the Wikipedia ?
IP address is a 4 number combination used as address by transfer protocol. Think it as normal human address.
Lets use 135.122.23.54 as example.
135 its like a state, 122 is like a district, 23 is like a town, 54 is like a house number. Think it as a postoffice postcode.
TCP (transfer protocol) look for these numbers to send its data. It will follow to gateway (post office), which will put the data in another envelope, repeat that until it reach its destination. Reverse also the same.

Internet Protocol

Now while these data (envelope) being passed around, some computer log it, with this log, you can trace which IP address (house number) access/send data to which address. It is the "log" that can lead you to point "that house", without the log, its pretty safe. There are other way to "see", think about the postman open, read and close back the envelope (data packet capture, analysed and sent back)/snoop. IP address can be shared (laptop/smartphone/wifi/printers) but can only exist only 1 at a time (gateway).

How we can point which person in that "house"/IP address if its shared ?
Each packet, also contain final destination, which is network card number/device number (MAC address), with this number, we can know who the person in that "house".

So, we can now pinpoint the person, provided we know who is using that device at that time to access that website. Handphone also have similar stuff, its the IMEI number.

The internet is currently not government controlled.

There are 5 Regional Internet Registries RIR's :
African Network Information Centre (AfriNIC) for Africa

American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) for the United States, Canada, several parts of the Caribbean region, and Antarctica.

Asia-Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC) for Asia, Australia, New Zealand, and neighboring countries

Latin America and Caribbean Network Information Centre (LACNIC) for Latin America and parts of the Caribbean region

Réseaux IP Européens Network Coordination Centre (RIPE NCC) for Europe, Russia, the Middle East, and Central Asia (actually located in Amsterdam)



These are all Non governmental Non profit organizations who delegate the IP addresses out to Local Internet Registries (Anything from a University to Government or ISP's). You can go to each of these RIR's and use their database to look up who own an IP address, However most ISP's use dynamic IP's and don't record their users information on said database, thus you would only be able to know who own the IP and not who's using it (Also, abuse is the owners responsibility not the RIR's).


There is a slight kink in the open Internet though, and that is the fact that the RIR's get their IP's from IANA which is indeed Government owned (US Govt) as the US funded and created the IP infrastructure and the World Wide Web (WWW), However as they are delegating the control away to NGO's from the top, then they are not in active control of it.

Hope this clears things up abit, ill try and stay active on this thread and answer any questions ,

Namaste.

reply to post by LightSpeedDriver


Here is an example of what im talking about:

Link to the RIPE NCC database

The above link is most likely your IP block , But that is the extent to which IP's can be used to trace people,

Namaste

reply to post by WiseThinker

Thanks but I know how it works, I (used to!) work in IT, system and (light) network admin tasks.

Your real answer is: It depends.

There's a lot of good information here, but it is mostly skirting the issue, which is whether an IP can be traced to you. The issue really is HOW CLOSELY can an IP address be traced to you, and this depends on how IP addresses are allocated, either dynamically or statically.

STATIC IP ADDRESSES

The networks are classified as Class A, Class B, or Class C. There are only a few large Class A networks. These can be subdivided into what amounts to Class B and Class C networks, and Class B networks can be subdivided into Class C networks. Many large corporation have entire Class B networks assigned to them. Many smaller organizations have one or more Class C networks assigned to them. IN THE OLD DAYS networks were assigned in a liberal manner.

IN THE OLD DAYS I was in charge of IT at a library system that had ten branch libraries. They ranged in size from about 1,000 square feet with five "IP-addressable devices" (known as computers) to 35,000 square feet with less than a hundred "IP addressable devices," known as computers. I asked for and was awarded one Class C Network for every branch, plus an additional one to tie these ten Local Area Networks (LANs) into a Wide Area Network (WAN). This was complete and utter overkill, as you will see.

A Class C Network is comprised of 256 numbers. For example, one of my Class C Networks was:

198.187.135.X where the numbers (X) ranged from 198.187.135.0 to 198.187.135.255. Now, you can't use "0" as an address and you can't use "255" as an address, so that left 254 numbers: 198.187.135.1 to 198.187.135.254 for assignment to my "IP addressable devices," known as computers. So I had 254 numbers to assign, in some cases, to a whopping five computers, leaving 249 free numbers, which, at this point were WASTED numbers.

In my largest branch I had more devices so I made up a scheme. The ".1" ("dot-one") address was reserved for my router. The "dot-tens" were reserved for my hubs. The "dot-20's" were reserved for my servers, the "dot-40's to "dot-90s" for my staff computers, and the "dot-100's" and above for my public computers. I just made this up and applied it to every branch. "dot-one" was always my router, etc.

So IN THIS CASE I assigned STATIC IP addresses to a specific computer, and mine was "dot-34," therefore if you found the number 198.187.135.34, you could pin it to me, personally, and the answer to your question is effectively,

"Yes, an IP address CAN be traced to a person."

DYNAMIC IP ADDRESSES

Now obviously in several years I found myself "resource rich." Those IP addresses were running out. A lot of the reason for this was the slop in the system as I have described. I had about 100 devices overall and about 3,000 IP addresses. They were MINE! too. No one could take them away from me and I wasn't about to give them up. Indeed, that would have been foolish, because now I had several hundred "IP addressable devices" including printers, fax machines, printer servers themselves, etc. And I had about 40 servers doing stuff like payroll, accounting, firewall"ing", virus protection, inventory control, online public catalog, CD-ROM servers, and suddenly those 254 numbers weren't enough for my largest branches.

So I stole some of the numbers from the very small branches and began to re-number my network to allow me more room to maneuver using a technique called "sub-masking." But if I had gone back to my "issuing authority" and started over and said, "I want 11 Class C networks they would have said, "Get a life. You ain't getting them." Indeed, when I had need for some different IPs on a separate network I asked US West (Quest, then Centurylink) and they gave me 4--reluctantly. So the era of freely-given and wasteful IP allocation was over.

So what is an organization like me to do? Implement DYNAMIC IP addressing. In this case, I would allocate IP addresses to my devices just like before, but on a temporary basis that had an "expiration." They could use this IP address for a certain period of time, but at some point would have to "renew" their address, at which point it might not be the same one they had prior. FURTHER, these addresses were for INTERNAL use only. By the time the signals got to my router, they appeared as if they were coming from a single IP address before they went out into the world, thus a hundred internal devices could share what amounted to a single IP address. This is now considered the "proper" thing to do, ethically.

This is known as "dynamic addressing" because it dynamically changes, and in this case there is no way to trace the IP address to you, personally, so your answer is,

"No, an IP address CANNOT be traced to a person."

BUT (there always is one) it could be traced to my library, so if the Bad Guys(tm) were interested in WHERE a given message originated, they would be knocking at my door knowing that from somewhere inside my network the message was sent. Could I then find out who sent that message? Perhaps. I can't tell you for certain. We'd have to go through the motions, examine exactly how the network was set up, and try to trace it.

THIS is how an Internet Service Provider allocates IP addresses. They do it dynamically. And it's also why you think you are insulated when your IP is reported a few cities away from your real location. When I was with Quest my location was usually in a city about 50 miles away called Tukwila. That's because that's where the Quest switching equipment was located. But if the Bad Guys(tm) were looking for me, they would know that I was within the Seattle metropolitan area. That's a couple of million people, but it's not 360 million, and at this point they could use other clues to narrow their search further. And, frankly, who knows what kind of tracing equipment and databases are kept by your ISP?

So, you see that the answer to your question is not a simple one. There are many factors involved, some of them even historical in nature. And that's why the answer is: It depends.

reply to post by schuyler


Wow, you should write a thriller. You are most certainly "IP-aware".

reply to post by WiseThinker


Never knew that there was one IP source, the top of the foodchain and it to be US govt. owned.

zatara
reply to post by WiseThinker

 

Never knew that there was one IP source, the top of the foodchain and it to be US govt. owned.

No. It certainly started as a US government project via the Advanced Research Projects Agency, the military, and some large universities. They invented it, including the same protocols that we use today, but the US does not "own" the system. It's managed by ICANN which is a non-profit and has multiple methods of input from countries other than the US.

Certainly there have been attempts by others to take over the Internet, most notably by the UN, which seems to feel it has some sort of claim to ownership. See here for details. From this source:

Although the United States and dozens of other countries have refused to sign the proposal, the ITU is nevertheless powering through with plans to put new rules and regulations on the world’s Internet, including implement sweeping deep-packet inspection powers and other efforts that could censor the Web.

With the US contributing the lion’s share of the organizations funding, advocates for an open Internet are asking for all that to change.

According to the just-launched website defundtheitu.org, the UN group currently spends around $180 million annually to advocate for that revamped treaty. But while the United States opposes the very actions the ITU seeks, they at the same time contribute a massive amount of the group’s resources.

The UN's stance seems to be that the USA should pay for it all while the UN controls it. I would not expect this proposal to go over very well as it is currently stated.