What happened when we got subpoenaed over our Tor exit node | Hacker News Reader

What happened when we got subpoenaed over our Tor exit node

boingboing.net

114 pointswaffle_ss28 comments

Noisetor (sub-project of the Noisebridge hackerspace in SF) received an identical subpoena, and had the same results. We contacted our legal counsel and subsequently the FBI to explain the whole "we can't provide this information because tor" at which point they dropped our requirement to testify.

If you want to run an exit node then this is, I think, required reading: https://blog.torproject.org/blog/tips-running-exit-node-mini...

This is barely content. "We got subpoenaed and our lawyer told the FBI we didn't have any logs and they never contacted us again." Ok, great.

The point is to be a counterpoint to all the tor exit node horror stories. The point is not to have interesting content.

I think this was an extremely useful thing to know. Having a good lawyer on your side helps. Thats is the lesson I learned.

how do you know the lawyer is good? i agree her letter was effective in this instance.

It is like studies that say 'we tried X and nothing happened'. No where near as interesting, but we should still consider it important.

On the contrary, it fights publication bias - it's important for the same reason that it's important that scientists publish negative results and don't just leave them in the proverbial drawer.

It's very useful information what with the scaremongering going on about Tor

Do you run a tor exit node? If not, why?

If you're going to call it scaremongering, at least admit that there are very legitimate fears for most people.

I don't want to pay for a Tor exit node.

But back when it was okay (for the network -- slow nodes now do more harm than good), I ran one from my house.

I would not say that anything that has a <1% frequency is a "very legitimate" fear.

What there actually is, is a legitimate chilling effect. Horror stories about running Tor nodes are direct attacks against the Tor network via a social channel. It wouldn't surprise me if typical actors were behind them, either, given the proclivity of virtually all governments to sockpuppet on social media.

> I would not say that anything that has a <1% frequency is a "very legitimate" fear.

That's an awfully broad statement. You might want to rethink it. I don't think you'd do air travel if there was merely a <1% chance the plane would crash.

I run multiple exits and consider much of what is written about the risks of running exit nodes to be overblown scaremongering, so it is nice to see an article about the actual reality of running exits: it's boring.

There are legitimate fears for people living in certain countries but many of the people handwringing about it aren't in those countries.

If you don't mind sharing, are you and your exit nodes in .us?

"And that was it" .. so far. I think they're getting a little ahead of themselves to assume they're in the clear simply because they haven't heard anything.

Unless they did hear something extremely definitive and simply decided not to share that with us in the way they did the command letter.

Let's see. The subpoena was issued on June 12, 2015. They were supposed to appear before the grand jury on July 1, 2015. The article was posted on August 4, 2015.

So they clearly missed appearing before the grand jury on July 1, and didn't get arrested for it. But yeah, it's a bit too soon to assume that no other shoes are going to drop...

There's only one other shoe that could drop, which would be an assertion that hosting a Tor exit node is illegal in general. I doubt the Feds want to argue that directly where it could be directly opposed.

No, the other shoe could be that they get a subpoena for all their logs of any form on the Tor machine or any machine connected to it, or something of that order.

Just to be totally sure that nothing is retained, one can use Tor-ramdisk from CD on a diskless box.[0]

[0] http://opensource.dyc.edu/tor-ramdisk

That's truly minimal package. That's great. Less than 7 megabytes. I'm just way too used to see bloat.

Just to be totally clear, it's a Linux distro :)

I'd be interested to see the actual subsequent discussion with the FBI following the initial subpoena.

There is a pretty decent chance there isn't any. Once the FBI got the Boing Boing response letter they probably checked with their tech people to see if it was true that there'd be no data and/or that it IS a TOR exit node and sent a simple 'nevermind you don't have to appear' letter. This matches with how the article is written, 'we sent this letter letter and that was it.'

The official response to Boing Boing (the resulting "nevermind you don't have to appear" letter) is exactly what I'd like to see.

The letter BB sent in response is right there in the article. It's the bit that starts with "Special Agent XXXXXX."

The official response isn't, though. (I edited my previous comment to clarify what I meant.)

Ah, misunderstood your original comment. It's probably nothing very interesting. All that is required is something like this. BB probably got something similar.

https://www.eff.org/document/letter-confirming-subpoena-with...

Thanks! I've never actually seen a letter like that; I appreciate the link to a sample one.

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