PEN registers don’t sell PENs

So to grasp the way that some internet data is traced today (issues for a later posting) it is important that we look at the past (and as it turns out, the present). The past part is the PEN register. A PEN register is a device that was attached to phone company switches and used to record the numbers called and the times those numbers were called. These devices were able to be set up without a warrant as they do not record the contents of the call. This was a wonderfully effective tool against phone harassers and organized crime as well as phone phreakers who would use other people’s calling cards to call all around the world to connect to BBSs (Bulletin Board Systems (the precursor to today’s internet communities)). Since courts found that PEN registers were legal as they didn’t invade on the content of the communications, it can naturally be extrapolated that the same is true for internet traffic (although the courts seem to have been selective in their decisions of what “old” technology relates to the internet (in almost all cases, ruling that your internet communications have far less protections than traditional means of personal speech, land line phone calls, or US mail.

From a privacy standpoint, the connection of the call (or internet traffic) may still contain information that a user might not want to have made available (say if you are a whistle blower calling a reporter or govt. agency or you’re someone calling an AIDS clinic or planned parenthood might strongly insinuate things, even if those assumptions are incorrect). Because of this, many folks in organized crime (and phone phreaks) began using public phones which they could always go to another one and this made tracing much more difficult (the equivalent today would be pay as you go cellular phones though these are monitor-able and the records of their calls are kept so there is still a record (the users of this technology rely on the “security though obscurity” model which we’ll discuss in the future why this isn’t a great way to protect your privacy)). On the internet people use programs like tor to obscure who they are connecting to. This may be of additional concern to people since Congress passed a bill this week increasing the government’s eavesdropping, and snooping, abilities.

In other news: Dateline associate producer Michelle Madigan was outed this week while attending the hacker convention Defcon. Apparently she had gone undercover and the organizers didn’t seem to like the idea of someone trying to get attendees to admit to felonies on camera to shock the “folks in Kansas”. Welcome to a strange turn of the previous topic of the conflict between free speech/free press and privacy.