on the lam (ignoring the gerbil)
A question for the company assembled . . . I should know the answer to this, but I’m not computer-literate enough.
If I send an email from some random place, can the cops or the KGB or someone trace it back to a neighborhood? To a specific location? Or just to a specific computer?
I’m assuming that someone who’s on the lam could send an email from a public service, like a library, and then get in his Aston-Martin and zip away.
It’s getting too damned hard to be a criminal for a living. Doesn’t stop people, though.
Joe
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The problem with the library theory is that most public library systems are pretty tightly locked down. They don't allow patrons to send emails from their machines. Instead, you'd have to contact some email server from the machine and have it send off the email, and that server, rather than the library would be the point of origin. The server would of course know the origin of the request, and if you accessed the email server, you'd probably have to provide credentials of some sort, which might trace the account back to you either directly or by examining where else you'd logged into the email server from.
A smart criminal wanting to send an anonymous email would break into a SMTP server directly, send an email from that server (perhaps using a simple program for that purpose, or even perhaps installing a GNU licensed SMTP server if none existed), and then tiding up the logs so that there was no record of his entry into the computer or what he did there. You could trace the email back to the machine, but there you'd probably hit a dead end. I suppose a library server would do in a pinch, but you'd probably be better off breaking into a university server. There are tons of unsecured unix boxes attached to most university networks owned by professors that aren't computer literate, its reasonably easy to break into a university network, and it would be easy for a compotent hacker to tidy up after themselves. Not that I'd know anything about such things.
A master criminal would have a network of comprimised machines set up for this purpose, would log sureptiously into a series of servers, finally sending out an email from a disposable one (someone's home computer infected with a root kit perhaps), and then clean up after himself.