The International Telecommunication Union has joined forces with the U.S.’ National Security Agency and the Chinese government to form a research group called the IP Traceback drafting group. All members of the group will meet next week in Geneva, Switzerland to work on a way to trace IP addresses.
Officials involved with the project have avoided all interview requests, and virtually all of the relevant documents have remained classified. CNET News managed to obtain one document submitted by China that described a tracing mechanism that could adapt to most Internet standards.
"IP traceback mechanism is required to be adapted to various network environments, such as different addressing, different access methods (wire and wireless) and different access technologies (ADSL, cable, Ethernet) and etc.," the document reads. "To ensure traceability, essential information of the originator should be logged."
Marc Rotenberg of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington looked at the project with suspicion.
"What's distressing is that it doesn't appear that there's been any real consideration of how this type of capability could be misused," said Rotenberg, who serves as the Electronic Privacy Information Center's director. "That's really a human rights concern."
Other governmental groups say that this technology could be used to hunt down terrorists and other hostile forces, but despite the possible benevolent uses for this technology, online tech expert Jacob Appelbaum said that it would be useless anyway.
"The technical nature of this feature is such a beast that it cannot and will not see the light of day on the Internet," he said. "If such a system was deployed, it would be heavily abused by precisely those people that it would supposedly trace. No blackhat would ever be caught by this."
By "blackhat," Appelbaum was referring to hackers and other nefarious elements. Columbia University computer scientist Steve Bellovin agrees. He said that most large-scale attacks on computer systems use multiple computers and that typically, those computers have been hacked anyway. He also argues that such technology would contravene the U.N.'s Universal Declaration of Human Rights
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