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Comment by Godel_unicode | Hacker News Reader

You have this backwards. The only person in the world who can be suspected of having originated that traffic is the person from whose network the requests can be seen originating. There's no way for law enforcement to know he didn't make those connections until they investigate, and thus (as others have said on this thread) it would be dereliction of duty for the officers not to have raided him.

If you're going to run a TOR exit node, which you are absolutely free to do, you have to expect this to happen from time to time and be prepared to explain why you are not responsible for the traffic you appear to have originated.

Cost of doing business. If standing on principle was free, it would be unremarkable.

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That cost of doing business is unacceptably high. It amounts to, "run a tor exit node, lose your 4th amendment rights... and your 5th amendment rights, if you want to keep your hardware... and consider your hardware compromised."

Who's going to run a tor exit node if that's the legal precedent?

It's also pointless. While it's possible for a CP collector or distributor to run an exit node as cover, why would they when they can just use tor for real for all their CP dealings?

Think of the ultimate consequences. Such a legal precedent would have CP and other criminal activity causing more collateral damage rather than less. If all it takes to get most tor exit node operators to shut them down is engaging in illegal activities that will draw the attention of the authorities, then I can imagine a lot of countries' intelligence and military services would have an interest in engaging in criminal activities using U.S. tor exit nodes to reduce the available pool of tor exit nodes.

> The only person in the world who can be suspected of having originated that traffic is the person from whose network the requests can be seen originating.

The IP address presumably actually belongs to the exit node operator's ISP. By this logic they should be raiding them instead.

> There's no way for law enforcement to know he didn't make those connections until they investigate

There's no way for law enforcement to know that you didn't make those connections until they investigate. That shouldn't be justification for raiding you, should it?

> If you're going to run a TOR exit node, which you are absolutely free to do, you have to expect this to happen from time to time and be prepared to explain why you are not responsible for the traffic you appear to have originated.

They already knew it was an exit node.

> If standing on principle was free, it would be unremarkable.

That is a very poor justification for unnecessarily making it more expensive.

Should they investigate libraries and coffee shops as well? How about the offices of businesses that offer VPN-based proxy services? Homes of those businesses' staff?

Absolutely. If a business is offering services that a customer is using to commit a crime, the police wouldn't be doing their jobs if they didn't go down and ask for logs.

You're conflating a raid with "asking for logs." If the police only asked the exit node operator if they had any logs there would hardly be any objection.

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