IP address can mislead in online crime
January 19, 2008, Indiatimes Infotech
This news item reports the sad case of a software professional who was wrongly convicted on charges that he uploaded offensive pictures of Shivaji on Orkut. The mistake, it is assumed, was done by making incorrect inferences on the IP addresses given to the police during investigation by the Internet Service Provider (ISP). The police claims that the investigation was conducted in a proper manner, making best use of the technology available. It is common that ISPs assign the same IP addresses to different users at different points of time leading to cases such as these where the timestamps are not properly scrutinized.