Battleangel

Yes, obviously, the NSA would be very interested in “advertising across geographic regions.” Right. Not only is this a hideous patent, the privacy implications are also huge. As noted in the article, geo-targetting is used even today, but one has to assume the NSA did something novel and improved upon that idea, hence increasing accuracy.

VUNET - The US National Security Agency has been granted a patent for technology that can provide the rough physical location of internet users based on their IP address.

Granted last month, the patent application outlines how the geographic location of internet users could be used to “measure the effectiveness of advertising across geographic regions” or flag a password that “could be noted or disabled if not used from or near the appropriate location”.

The technology appears to be based on measuring the ‘latency’ (the time lag between computers exchanging data) of “numerous” locations on the internet and building a “network latency topology map”.

Obviously, it only works with certain types of connections, dial-up not being one of them. The article also states that the technology is dependant on the Whois database, supposedly for mapping the world’s infrastructure electronically as a framework for mapping intended IP coordinates. Or perhaps that is exactly what they are trying to work their way around. At any rate it is unlikely to be able to take into account anonymizers and proxies. As stumbling as the technology seems, the intentions of the NSA are hard to misread.