Thanks to the Google search engine, I was able to find your e-mail address. Anyway, you might be interested to know about certain clauses in the United States Constitution.

Those clauses are cited by one A Alexander “Bogey” Stella in an internet article. In his article, Mr Stella disputes the constitutionality of recent law suits, filed by the RIAA against people who download music. If you’re interested in reading the article, all you need do is scroll down a bit, after clicking on the pink hyperlink below:

UP AGAINST THE BULKHEAD!

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Well, it happens sometimes that hyperlinks have to transferred directedly, like so:

URL: http://www.bcvoice.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=154

Or, maybe, you need only click on my hi-lited name. Oh, one more thing, please ignore the snide remark some scabrous graffito vandal appended to the end of the article.

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Whoops, missed something I wanted to respond to:

“Do proxy servers even record such information?”

Maybe.

Depends on the operator, software, etc. In the case of common HTTP proxies, it’s common to record every “hit”, which includes the IP address of the requestor, specific URL retrieved, date+time, amount of data retrieved, status code (200, 404, etc.), and in the case of proxy servers that require authentication, the username of the requestor.

A proxy configured by a paranoid administrator for the purpose of providing anonymity wouldn’t have any logging whatsoever. In the slightly less paranoid case, they might log just basic transfer amount statistics with no uniquely identifying information.

If you want these proxies to be truly useful for anonymizing, you need to trust the proxy, you need to be communicating with the proxy over a strongly encrypted channel, there needs to be a random delay factor, and there needs to be a large pool of other users transferring data at the same time.

In other words: you really need to trust the proxy, and a proxy that does all the things needed to disguise you thoroughly will take enough resources that you’d have to be paying for it.

Also, even if they’re not liable, could their records still be seized? Could a court order to the proxy’s ISP allow the non-liable proxy’s traffic to be watched to determine who the liable end-points are?

Proxy servers:

Yes, proxy servers really can hide the IP of the sender and receiver, at their discretion.

Basically, the sender and receiver both just need to connect to the proxy, so there’s no need for either to know who they are.

You have to trust the proxy, though. The proxy will know the addresses of senders and receivers, and all data will pass through it. And you have to trust the network locations that the proxies are housed at, as well.

The big problem with proxies is bandwidth; since everything has to go through them, they need to be capable of sustaining bandwidth equal to both the sum of all senders and the sum of all recipients. If they’ve figured out how to use existing proxies, such as those housed at the ISP the respective clients are using, this may not be as much of a problem. (Many ISPs have HTTP proxies set up; because they can cache content that’s fetched repeatedly, this helps the ISP reduce their own bandwidth usage. AOL is a good example where HTTP traffic mostly goes through a proxy)

I just re-read 512 and I can’t find a way to hold proxy servers liable… however, with 1000 subpoenas being granted to the RIAA et al. per day… yikes…