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Originally Posted by clawhammer
Well, most likely not even a private investigator will be able to get anywhere, because the message is sent from aol's server to your computer, it's not a direct connection. You will probably need to get AOL to give you the IP address that the person uses, which is going to be very difficult.
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This is on assumption that packets cannot be traced beyond the AOL server. In an open source computing system you have the ability to manipulate packets/datagrams and also to change the way it operates.
In a linux system you can change the data in a packet and the encapsulation mechanism to allow the packet to broadcast at interval to the original node which it sends from (the private investigater's computer) to know where it current locations is.
The packet itself will perform all necessary work on your behalf but you will definately need to know what your doing and what you'll be up agaisnt as these activities are so very illegal. Also another factor to account for is the various filtering system which the system's expert will be required to encourter (filtering system such as gateways, connection policies, firewalls, etc). These will further prevent the actions of the packet so there may be a lot of work required to be done, but as I said its not impossible, just a lot of work.
Altering of the encapsulation of packets is not recommanded as you really need to know what each layer does and how it effects it, plus it all have a finite size, so you'll need to accomodate for various protocols and sizes which the packet switched network may use.