Back when the old forum was still up, Quasi had made a post about the information he had and what he collected. He specifically said he only had the email addresses that people used to sign up with, and that most of them were probably spoofed.
He also specifically stated that the only IP addresses he was collecting were from Cloudflare. Let's assume you opened up a browser and surfed over to the old forums (onaforums.net). Let's also assume your IP address from your ISP was 192.168.1.1 and you weren't using a VPN or Tor
Quasi is/was using a service called Cloudflare to protect the board from DDoS attacks, among other things. Here's a link to their site where they explain it.
https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/what-is-cloudflare/
So when you used your browser to get to the forums, what actually happened was instead of going straight to the forum, you first hit a cloudflare server and were then redirected to the forums. This is all transparent to the end user but to the server running the forums, your request to view the board was no longer coming from your IP address (192.168.1.1) it was coming from whatever Cloudflare server you hit on the way in (let's just call it 10.1.1.1).
Quasi actually pasted a snippet of the logs he was collecting and indicated that the only IPs he collected were the Cloudflare IPs. I don't even know if he had the option of collecting the original source IPs or not, but he didn't.
Brinton is pissing and moaning because Quasi gave him all the info he had on John Does 2-60, which was their email addresses here and whatever Cloudflare IPs they connected with. Like Mewler already said, those emails could be changed at any time and the IPs don't lead back to anyone in particular. I'm assuming that Brinton would have to try and subpoena Cloudflare with the list of IPs Quasi gave him and see if they could match those to other addresses. To go back to our example, if you connected to the board at 12:05 am on April 1, they would have to go to Cloudflare and see if they could see that 192.168.1.1 connected to 10.1.1.1 and went to onaforums.net on 12:05am on April 1. I'm thinking that since Cloudflare is a heavily used service, they may or may not be able to trace individual connections back like that but I could be wrong.
It's also a moot point for anyone using Tor or a VPN.
Tin foil hat time, I don't know if Quasi is still active or if someone else took over but I haven't seen anything in this new forum that says what's being kept/logged. They may be collecting real IPs so I would probably use Tor/VPN just to be safe.
