internet

So what’s in my internet log files?

It’s a fair question that anyone who wants to protect their privacy should be asking. What’s in my Internet Log files and who can access them? Well I’m afraid, and you’re not going to like this, is just about everything you do online is stored in logs files.

In fact even just the phrase internet log files is confusing as there are so many of them.   Let’s focus on the main ones which contain the most information about you online and that’s the ISP logs.

You see when you connect to the internet every thing you do is routed through your ISP, they have a complete record of everything you do pretty much. One of the main problems is that we use HTTP to surf the internet, that’s Hyper Text Transport Protocol – which has helped the internet to develop so amazingly fast.

There is a problem with HTTP though, and that is because it is in completely clear text. So anyone who has access to this data like the ISP can instantly read it and see exactly what and where you go on the internet.

It’s why Governments and organisations access this information when searching for terrorists, criminals and even just people who downloaded materials under copyright.  It’s all there in the internet log files stored at your local ISP.  There’s no technical knowledge needed to learn how to view .log files as the vast majority of it’s in clear text with no encryption.  It’a all recorded at that central point simply because all your data has to go through an ISP, which is recorded and saved to the .log file extension of their choice.

Internet Log files

Who Has the Right to Access My Internet Log Files ?

You might argue that any law abiding individual has nothing to fear from having their online activity recorded.  After all normal citizens shouldn’t care even if they are engaged in a little anonymous torrenting to download a few films, that’s nothing to the Government is it? However just consider how much information there actually is stored there in those log files.  Everything web site you visit, every video you watch, every message you send or receive it’s all there in your log files.   Would you be happy to hand over a comprehensive list of everything you’ve done online?   It’s a huge intrusion to your privacy, imagine a step further one made likely by the Governments latest piece of snooping legislation – the Investigatory Powers Act.  It’s been passed in Parliament but hasn’t got Royal Assent yet, but it’s likely to become law in the near future.  It would mean a whole host of Government agencies have access to these records for a variety of reasons.

Imagine you’re sitting in an interview for a Government job?  Across the table the interviewer sits with a booklet containing every web site you’ve visited in the last 12 months.  How would that make you feel?  Does this feel like an open, democratic situation or something like the KGB or Stasi would have done?   Perhaps you have medical conditions, something about your health or sexuality, perhaps private political affiliations.  All this is likely to be known from anyone’s web history and hence the person sitting across from you with your internet log files.

Even if this information was restricted to a select few agencies, we know this would spread.  The data once out would get into more and more hands, usually under some pretext of criminality or preventing terrorism.

The solution is actually quite simple but it does require some effort – encryption.  If you use a VPN service, you can encrypt your connection so that your logs contain no useful information. Here’s one in action –

The only information accessible in your logs as long as you keep encryption enabled will be the time you are online and the IP address of the VPN server you’re connected to. there will be no other data that is legible as it will all be encrypted and no record of the web servers you visit as all requests will be channeled through the VPN server. The added benefit of this is that you can also use the VPN service to bypass the myriad internet blocks that exist online.

For example, you may have found that certain sites particularly media companies block access based on your location. It’s called region locking or geo-targeting and it’s becoming increasingly common. For example if you try and access your Hulu subscription from outside the US you’ll get blocked, or similarly if you try and watch the BBC iPlayer from outside the UK. However if you switch to a VPN server in the correct country you can bypass these blocks irrespective of your location. I use mine every single day when travelling to watch the BBC News when I’m travelling.

Update on the Australian Internet Filtering

There has been an update (28th, June 2011) on the Australian Government’s internet filtering scheme and I’m afraid it still suffers from the usual limitations of such censorship schemes. To be fair they have made a few changes after the huge wave of crticism from the initial prototype scheme which frankly was ill conceived, badly implemented and well pointless to be honest.

So what has the Internet Industry Association (Australian Internet body) come up with this time?

Well it’s probably not surprising considering the current economic climate that it’s definitely pretty cheap. In fact there is virtually no new equipment required, nothing more than a few tweaks to current infrastructure. It’s important to keep costs down when you’re doing something as pointless as this sort of censorship of course.

Now of course no-one can argue with the basic assumption that we should protect children and restrict access to child pornography. The scheme will effectively implement the blocking of a list of such sites provided by Interpol and the Australian Federal Police. The onus will pretty much be on the ISPs using the big stick of section 313 if Australia’s Telecommunication Act. It’s not much more than a basic framework of a big blacklist of bad sites which are blocked by the ISPs in their routing tables.

The sites will also be blocked by the even more pointless method of modifying DNS tables. Just to clarify this method involves changing the DNS tables on Australian servers so that the ‘bad’ sites don’t resolve to their correct servers properly. It’s a very crude method, easily bypassed and one I’ve never liked. Messing around with the way the internet works is never a good idea but of course as well as being pointless and easily circumvented – it does have the advantage of being CHEAP!

Needless to say this probably won’t end here – lists of stuff you can’t do rarely get shorter. We’ll probably end up seeing lots of committees and groups lobbying for other web sites to be added to the list. Just as now you see some web sites about evolution being blocked in restrictive Muslim countries.

It’s an almost complete waste of time in my opinion. It’s headline grabbing nonsense that has very little real affect other than allowing a Government to pretend it’s doing something about a problem. The blocks and filtering will only be effective against people who don’t want to access these sites anyway – the vast majority of us. These filtering techniques are so easily bypassed by anyone with a mind to, there are literally thousands of security programs, secure VPNs and private proxies that just make these methods completely ineffective.

The other main issues is that the vast majority of this material is not stored on standard web servers. It’s shared by email, P2P and FTP – it’s stored and distributed on private networks and areas like the darknet. None of these filtering will effect these distribution points.  Censorship is being implemented against the wrong people – innocent users of the internet.   It will have no effect on sophisticated rings of technologically savvy paedophiles across the internet.

But the real concern is that it’s simply posturing and blocking access to a problem rather than trying to solve it. It doesn’t help the victims by altering routing tables so that Australian citizens can’t access the material – it’s still there, the victims are still victims. This posturing would be better replaced by concerted efforts to track down arrest and bring to justice the people who are creating and distributing this material. It’s of course much more difficult to do but does actually have an impact.  Of course it will create more demand for an Aussie proxies perhaps.


What we’ll end up with is more pointless censorship on the average, law abiding internet users.