IP address geolocation and Banning IPSec

1. Filtering system is difficult to implement. In the example of Yahoo vs. French Government, Yahoo argued that location-based filtering is limited in its effectiveness. The location-detection technology has greatly changed since. For example, now IP addresses are often tied to mobile devices with GPS coordinates. Search engines and location-based services try to determine your location based on your IP addresses. Read this article and write your opinion on whether IP address is individually-identifiable information or not. Support your argument with references.

I think that an IP address is still not an individually identifiable information. IP addresses identify a machine, not a person. Any person could be using that machine. And as we discussed in class there are ways to circumvent location-based filtering using IP addresses, such as proxy services and IP address spoofing.

Although devices may use IP addresses for locating you, it is still unreliable because of these ways that you can circumvent it. For example, google uses other ways to determine your location, such as wi-fi hotspots in conjunction with your IP address for a computer, and cell towers for mobile devices.

Sources: http://www.google.com/mobile/gmm/mylocation/index.html

http://maps.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=153807

2. IPSec is an Internet standard that can provide VPN (Virtual Private Network) between computers. If a user in more restricted country "A" wishes to communicate with a user in less restricted country "B", they could IPSec with encryption to avoid the monitoring by the "A" government. "A" government now wishes to ban IPSec in this country. Describe what steps "A" needs to take to ban IPSec in this country.

To attempt to ban IPSec, the government would need to collaborate with ISP's to refuse all connections made using gateway routers. By refusing all connections using gateway routers, this would specify that all the header files must contain the original IP address of the origin of the message, which would break IPSec

Also, they can refuse all encrypted header files, which IPSec does to protect privacy.