Traditional methods of conducting measurements to end hosts require sending unexpected packets to measurement targets. Although existing techniques can ascertain end host characteristics accurately, their use in large-scale measurement studies is hindered by the fact that unexpected traffic can trigger alarms in common intrusion detection systems, often resulting in complaints from administrators. We describe BitProbes, a measurement system that works around this challenge. By coordinated participation in the popular peer-to-peer BitTorrent system, BitProbes is able to unobtrusively measure bandwidth capacity, latency, and topology information for ∼500,000 end hosts per week from only eight vantage points at the University of Washington. To date, our measurements have not generated a single complaint in spite of their wide coverage.