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Comment by ajmurmann | Hacker News Reader

Let me pay devil's advocate for a moment: let's say I want to do bad things on the Internet and obviously I don't want to get my house raided. So now I set up a Tor node in my house. Doing that I created reasonable doubt and my house can't get raided.

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An ip address is not good enough to locate someone. If they have evidence beyond an ip address sure raid the house, but if they have no identity evidence beyond an ip address then they need to understand they have no identifying evidence.

Per this article yesterday, MaxMind(a geolocation ip service) lists a farm in Kansas (selected because it is roughly the midpoint of the US) as it's unknown location as a result it is given as the address for something like 600 million ip addresses. The farm's owner has been harassed by several law enforcement agencies and countless vigilantes.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11466849

An IP address is often more than enough to locate a computer. If it's using an ISP which has an account with an address associated with it where that IP has been provisioned, you can locate a site.

No, you can't identify a suspect or a user. But you can say "I detected child porn at this IP address, this IP address is at this house" and that's more than enough reason to search that house.

Simple geolocation APIs, and using a law enforcement request for an account holder's address are two very different things.

I agree that's a larger issue. However, IP addresses being enough evidence for a search seems somewhat out of scope of the article.

That's a fair point. The raid seemed to have been fairly quick, efficient and polite (compared to other raids I've read about). So, combine that and the fact that nothing was seized, and it sounds to me like the police were just checking to make sure the situation you outlined was not the case. It sounds like they were just doing due diligence. I'm not really sure why folks are so surprised and/or offended by this.

I think that traffic originating from an IP address is very weak evidence, regardless of whether someone runs a Tor node or not. With all the malware and insecure, unsupported software running everywhere, it might be more likely than not that random illegal traffic is coming from IPs whose owners are oblivious.

I would hope that law enforcement has more evidence than just an IP in a server log when they raid your place.

Can you give an example of such evidence and how it would be gathered? I don't disagree with you but I can see both sides of this.

For example, if the same illegal websites were accessed from someone's home wifi and their mobile phone?

Or maybe the target used the same pseudonym for illegal activities that they used years ago on a public forum?

Thanks, that does make sense.

How does this compare to a cash-only business? Say I run a banana stand that only accepts cash. What level of proof does law enforcement need in order to look into more personal aspects of my life and business if they believe I am using it launder money?

IANAL but this feels similar to me.

I don't know what it's like in other countries, but I think in Austria the "finance police" routinely check random businesses for correct books and compliance with the law. No sign of actual wrongdoing necessary. Businesses don't have the rights to privacy that individuals have.

It's unlikely that an exit node operator would be convicted in the US unless the raid turned up illegal content actually hosted on their computers.

You don't need to be convicted or even charged with a crime for police or the feds to steal all of your computer equipment and never return it.

No, you can/should just do the bad things through Tor, then you're not even a target of suspicion.

If they have some other link to you, the fact that the traffic is coming out of your house isn't doing you any favors.

So anyone to stupid to use Tor can go free and people operating the Tor nodes to enable the perps can go free as well?

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