With the growth of technology and eruption of a wide variety of programming languages, as also the application base required for programming changing dynamically, it has become all the more complex and difficult for law enforcing agencies to snoop, track, debug and identify the type of content being transmitted over the internet. With the internet explosion beyond the imagination of technologists and associated bodies, example, the urgent need to move to IPV 6, investigative searches also need to improve their skills to track and access information to help indict wrongdoers. The ball does not stop there. These kind of technological developments also give birth to misuse by techies, breaking into expensive research and development oriented software or applications, as also introduction of malwares into the system.
Recently, we have seen the furore worldwide of WikiLeaks pumping in a lot of highly secret documentation over the net creating a furore worldwide on governments and their methodologies of working for the good or bad on various international issues. Being beyond the scope of technology availability within the resources of the investigative agencies, the trend today is to employ private or other departmental companies to research and help in investigation, using the technology available, giving them an insight as to what and where and how of a probable crime in this advanced IT world.
One of the most interesting questions on this news of a company called Tiversa Inc. claiming evidence related to WikiLeaks using so called peer to peer networks, and provider of information resources, data availability, is like believing that you can actually find a pin in a haystack. In fact, it is also not very clear to date on the legality and whether concerned justice departments actually have official investigations called for regarding Tiversa’s downloads. Companies like LimeWire and Kazaa are free peer to peer file sharing client programs running on a wide variety of operating systems that support the Java platform.
LimeWire, Kazaa are few of the programs / applications using the commonly known BitTorrent protocols. With this, users worldwide are able to download free music, video, pictures etc. It is still too early to understand why these companies have been brought into the gamut of investigation, in the WikiLeaks case. Siphoning of information from peer to peer users is definitely a wrongdoing. The question is whether WikiLeaks siphoned information from peer to peer networks or were provided information internal sources of various organizations, which data was released on the internet.
If important and confidential information is being transmitted over a peer to peer network, is it right, is it safe and is it done. If there is such a bad practice of confidential information movement and, if WikiLeaks has been doing some unwanted snooping, and if the authorities can prove it in any way possible, it definitely needs to be curbed. Peer to peer networks are quite safe from general snooping and if informers are providing data, then this method is an ingenious one.
