Some related posts from Technorati and Google.

[All Points Blog: Our Opinion, Your Views ”” The Weblog for Location Technology & GIS] NSA Granted Geolocation Patent: US patent 6,947,978, Method for geolocating logical network addresses, uses the latency of connections together with a network topology map to determine the approximate location of net users. Quova and other “geotargeting” firms have similar technologies but apparently the government will use the technology for things like shutting out access to classified information based on location, instead of advertising and making online gambling available on where it is legal.

 [ShoutingLoudly] NSA patents net location-tracking method: On Tuesday, the National Security Agency secured patent #6,947,978 for a method of identifying an internet user's physical location based on IP address. It works by triangulating the target in relation to known IP addresses--comparing the delay between the target's transmission and its passage through known geographic anchors.

 [In Memorandum: H. Duthel, German Author, Philosoph, Nuernberg 1950 - Geneva 2004 +] China and Google: One thrust of this is determining geolocation from IP number. Currently this is about 80 percent effective in fixing the IP number to a major city, and over...

[Schneier.com] Schneier on Security: NSA Watch: Elliptic Curve Cryptography provides greater security and more efficient performance than the first generation public key techniques (RSA and Diffie-Hellman) now in use. As vendors look to upgrade their systems they should seriously consider the elliptic curve alternative for the computational and bandwidth advantages they offer at comparable security.

 [News.com.com] NSA granted Net location-tracking patent | CNET News.com: The NSA's patent relies on measuring the latency, meaning the time lag between computers exchanging data, of "numerous" locations on the Internet and building a "network latency topology map." Then, at least in theory, the Internet address to be identified can be looked up on the map by measuring how long it takes known computers to connect to the unknown one.

[Techdirt.com] Techdirt:NSA Patents The Ability To Spy On You Via The Internet: I don't see how a ICMP Echo (more commonly known as Ping) packet is anonymous, because an ICMP Reply packet has to travel back. Therefore, both destination and source IP addresses are in a ping packet.

 [Digg.com] NSA patents method of geo-location from Net traffic: I'm re-reading it now, and it seems they're not just going by an IPLocation map, but also using latency to determine your actual distance from servers...

Reflected tags on Technorati: Blog, Geolocation, Geotags.org