Micronics

Leaving aside other possible investigative avenues, how should you attempt to turn “eatmyjukt” into an actual name and address? What can you do on your own? What can the FBI do? How likely is this process to succeed? What could go wrong? Your strategy should consider both the technical and legal aspects of the problem. (Hint: The technical part will take more than one step. The legal part is straightforward, if you do things right. Refer back to the Stored Communications Act, supra, as needed.)

Under § 2701 of the Stored Communications Act, whoever “intentionally accesses without authorization… or intentionally exceeds an authorization… obtains, alters, or prevents authorized access to a wire or electronic communication while it is in electronic storage in such system shall be punished.” Here, an unknown actor has gained access, and overwrote a file that contained a prototype design, and replaced it with a pornographic picture. There are exceptions to § 2701 but those would likely not apply here. This is clearly a violation of § 2701.

In order to identify the person responsible, there are a few things that can be done. First, to communicate on the internet, you need at the very least an IP address, which can be used to identify the person responsible. IP addresses are assigned to ISPs in blocks; ISPs generally keep records of which IP addresses they assigned to which subscribers and when. Under § 2703, a governmental entity may require a provider of electronic communication service… to disclose a record or other information pertaining to a subscriber to or customer of such service. However, there are requirements the governmental entity must meet, one of which could be a warrant or in some cases, a court order. This could be an avenue in order for the ISP to disclose information about the IP address associated with the attacker. However, it is possible to forge your IP address when sending messages or can be given to a proxy. We could also check any device communicating on an Ethernet or Wi-Fi network. They would have a unique “media access control” (MAC) address. However, these can also be changed and make it hard to track down. We also need to be careful in case the suspect is underage, especially with the transmission of pornographic images.