A couple of weeks ago I received an email from a friend in NSW publicising the effort to find Daniel Morcombe. As a rule I don’t do anything about pleas such as this because I have been hoaxed in the past, but in this case I made an exception and forwarded the email to my address book list.
Today I read in the paper about a sick individual who has sent hoax emails purporting to have kidnapped the kid. I hope they throw the book at the bastard, ban him from studying at QUT and find some way of denying him access to email forever. (N.B. bunyip: I stopped short of wishing cancer on him).
I would be interested in knowing how he was traced to computers at internet cafes. I understood that if one established an anonymous id at a place like a cafe or the public library, it is almost impossible to trace identity.
The article says the guy “sent the e-mails from computers at Internet cafes, his home and Queensland University of Technology where he studied computer science.”
Presumably police were able to trace him mostly from the home and QUT emails, with Internet cafe ones being tied in by their common content, style or cross-references showing it was the same person.
Given that this bloke was a computer science student at QUT, he’s obviously grossly incompetent as well as a sick puppy.
Emails record a sender ip address. ISP’s log ip address assignments over time. This will give a site or a phone line. That ties an email to a particular machine at a particular time. If you do something stoopid in the same session like accessing your “home” email account or some other crosslinkable site accesses – it will be logged. Otherwise, it down to fairly conventional detective work like talking to the internet cafe staff, onsite or nearby security camera tapes, payment records, repeat visits, etc.
It’d easy to slip up, but it’s quite possible to hide your identity if you were smart and disciplined. Given how this boy gets his kicks, you might surmise he’s a bit of a dill. He probably got cocky, enthused, or whatever and made some elementary mistakes.
I was vaguely considering the Daniel Morcombe thing but then I discovered that the whole thing was featured, photos and all, in the Women’s Weekly.
Nothing could match that kind of publicity. Consider public awareness raised.