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Comment by pmocek | Hacker News Reader

> If the police see the law being broken, they have an obligation to investigate

I have seen no reporting--not even in Detective Daljit Gill's affidavit in support of her application for search warrant (which I've read)--that police observed any violation of law related to the search. They claim to have received a tip, from 4chan, filtered through a national clearinghouse, that about seven weeks prior someone had allegedly transferred to 4chan a video of an unidentified woman abusing an unidentified child in an unknown location at an unknown time, allegedly from an IP address that they discovered was assigned by an ISP to David and that they learned prior to the search was the exit point from an anonymizing proxy network.

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I'm not sure what this has to do with my comment. Is your point that they should not have bothered to investigate further because they found that there happened to be a TOR exit node? If so, I'm not sure it's a better situation, where the police say "eh, he's probably not trading in child porn himself. We can let this one go." That's just sloppy policing.

The point is not whether he was responsible for the child porn traffic, but whether they have an obligation to investigate, and I think they do. In this case, that means a raid, since it's an individual and not a business (a business would likely have people that would speak out, and individual mean that if he's guilty, there's no reason for him to incriminate himself). Even so, raids on businesses happen as well, when there is a belief a evidence might be destroyed.

Your assertion was based on the flawed premise that police observed a violation of law in this case. I have seen no indication that they saw such. They reportedly acted on a fourth-party tip about a third party claim that an unknown person transferred a file apparently containing evidence of a past crime to that third party's computer. I edited my comment to quote yours in clarification of this.

You are correct, but I think it's well within the purview of the police to decide to investigate a tip like that, even if it is a TOR exit node.

That is, I'll amend my earlier statement. If the police have been notified about a law being broken, it's within acceptable behavior to follow up on that tip.

In this case, while inmy eyes the existence of a TOR exit node might reduce the likelihood that the person running it was responsible for the traffic, it also raises the likelihood that the traffic existed in the first place in my opinion. That puts the police in an interesting position, in that depending on how they weight those items, they may decide to investigate further.

In any case, I think my point stands, which is that when you make yourself responsible for delivering other people's traffic without oversight, you are increasing the chance that something problematic may result. Thinking it should have no effect on you is unrealistic.

Imagine that police got a tip from some clearinghouse about contraband someone else claimed to have received via FedEx delivery of a sealed container, so they convinced a judge to authorize them to go into the FedEx depot to search for and seize any delivery vehicle, shipping carton, shipping label, or related documentation in sight. That's roughly what happened here, but worse, the Tor exit relay operator could not trace backward from the package they delivered to the person from whom it originated, and the police knew it.

Sure, the package could have been injected by somebody at the FedEx depot, but there is no evidence of such, and thus no cause for search.

I'm not sure why you're using an example I specifically addressed a few comments back in a way that accounts for nothing I said.

A business with multiple employees is not the same as an individual when investigating a crime, depending on whether you think it's likely that they are colluding.

The traffic of the suspect and TOR was mingled, therefor it is not possible to say whether the offending traffic was from TOR or the suspect. If it was from the suspect, there could have been traces on his systems.

A low probability is not the same as no possibility, and there was a possibility he was trading in child pornography. Your threshold for how high that probability should be compared to the investigating officers, or their superiors, may differ. At this point, it's subjective, which is what I was getting at in my prior comment.

In any case, this is irrelevant to my original point, which I already clarified in my prior comment. But to address what may have been your intent, yes, I believe that a package forwarding service may have some problems with the police from time to time. It may not be to the level you describe, but my point clearly does not require that.

To put it plainly, if you in any way enable illegal activity, even unknowingly, it's not entirely unexpected that at times you may face increased scrutiny, or legal misunderstandings. For the suspect in this case to say he "shouldn't have to" is not realistic. That would allow a de-facto smokescreen for real criminals to hide behind.

> I believe that a package forwarding service may have some problems with the police from time to time.

Yes, of course, they may. Police act in unethical or even unlawful manners from time to time. At question is not whether judges may warrant searches by police that they should not warrant, it is whether those searches should be warranted.

A fourth-party tip relayed through a third party about someone allegedly transferring via a computer network that provides locational privacy a file that apparently contains evidence of crime committed by an unidentified person in an unknown place at an unknown time is not any indication that the operator of the machine from which the file exited the anonymizing network onto the open Internet is party to any crime, whether that operator performs the service for fee, for free, at a commercial property, or at a residential property, as an individual, or as part of a group.

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