(Re)publish: Why Every Internet user should care about FISCR 16–01
Recently, I introduced FISCR 16–01, including the effects of the decision and how the court got it massively wrong. What I didn’t cover was the broader applicability of the decision and why everyone should care. So lets do that now.
FISCR 16–01 Applies to the Internet
Pen Registers, the legal tool at issue in this case, are all about so-called DRAS (dialing, routing, addressing and signaling) information — more commonly known as telephone metadata. In telephony, this is generally agreed to be the digits a user dials — when they’re dialed in order to connect one telephone to another.
Enter the internet.
The internet is a wealth of routing and signaling information. The model usually used to represent this is the TCP/IP model. Unfortunately, it’s a technical model and covers way too much detail for what we need here, so we’ll be using a simplified version.
In order to understand just how much information there is in internet metadata, let’s take a look at how much we can pull out of a typical web request — one page, not including any images, scripts or other dynamic content.
