cops and users
Back around the same era, I was working at a small ISP. If you worked at an ISP in those days, you had to keep your Usenet spools from getting too huge. That often meant giving up on all of the binearies (I think I misspelled it correctly) newsgroups. Those were newsgroups that contained binary files, as opposed to simple text (oh, and some were under "binaries" as well). Even if you weren't spooling the content, a look through the logs made you realize you had some users whose sexual preferences leaned to the wrong side of legal.
One day the inevitable happened. A police officer showed up at our door asking to connect an IP address to the identity of the person who was logged in at a specific time. We asked (nicely) that they request using a warrant, so that we were covered legally. The next day, they came back with a warrant, and left with a name.
Years later, I found out what triggrred the request. Kiddie porn? Nope. Sharing copyrighted material? Nah. Email scam? No. Turned out the perpitrator had posted disparaging comments about some local officers to a web page somewhere.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
