[oclug] tuesday afternoon rant about the FBI and an isp

[David F. Skoll]

On Mon, 19 Mar 2001, Billy Omer wrote:

> What I don't understand is why wouldn't they look at what I was scanning?

Maybe because fighting child pornography in this manner is not the
best way to go about it?  I appreciate your sentiments, but doing
things of questionably legality is really not the way to fight
obscenity.

> Anyone know what the government is using as a packet sniffer, what
> techniques they use to view the packets etc..?

Carnivore?  A deal with your ISP to divert all traffic their way?

> Has anyone had a similar problem?

Nope.  I strongly advise you not to portscan systems without the
sysadmin's permission.  It's generally considered impolite, and if you
use the portscanned information to break into or DoS the victim,
you're probably breaking the law.

I run intrusion-detection systems on many of my clients' networks, and
you can bet that I contact owners of machines which port-scan my
clients.  It's just part of conscientious network administration.

--
David.