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Comment by darkengine | Hacker News Reader

I'm the furthest thing from a lawyer, but "knowingly and intentionally" sounds to my lay self like it's a test of mens rea. If I were operating a Tor node in the EU, I would probably assume until stated otherwise that operating a Tor node remained legal, as long as I wasn't operating that node with the intention of circumventing the ban on RT.

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Agreed. There are already tons of laws on the books that prohibit "knowingly and intentionally" contributing to a crime. If simply being aware that a service you provide could in general be used to commit a crime, and likely was being used to do so, given the large number of users, then not only would every Tor node operator be considered an accessory to drug trafficing and child pornography, but every ISP would as well, and this new law would be the least of your worries. At least in the US, that wording implies more concrete knowledge of specific actions.

That said, like you and the OP, I am not a lawyer, or even a citizen of an EU country.

"Knowingly and intentionally" seems to apply to the operation (e.g. "you know that you're running a Tor node") - "circumvention" is on the basis of "object or effect". (For ESL speakers: "object" means "goal", "effect" means "result", and Tor obviously has a final, de-facto result of unblocking RT)

This is an overly broad reading. The hypothetical Tor operator's object (i.e. intent) is to run a Tor node, the contents of which they are entirely agnostic to (and may be formally agnostic to, if the traffic is additionally encrypted).

To use some abductive reasoning, think about how this would apply generally: the law is clearly not written to ban encryption, even though your interpretation would suggest that any encryption amounts to intentional circumvention. If that sounds wrong to you, it's because you've confused the intent/object that the law is concerned with.

No, encryption isn't going to help, because they can still block on IPs. Encryption plus eSNI helps, and if, for example, Yandex.Cloud sets up a big "shared host," I fully expect that to get the Kharkiv treatment, like Roskomnadzor tried a few years ago with Telegram.

Tor operators can see the IP, they can see the DNS, and their operation has the effect of unblocking RT.

Who can still block on IPs? An interior Tor node doesn't have the information available to do that.

I think you missed the point of the abductive argument: you're describing a cat and mouse game, one that is fundamentally unrealistic. The more realistic scenario is that the intent described in the article has nothing to do with encryption, Tor, or anything like that.

If you ran a tor node and piped the content of RT to newpipetoRT.com you're in violation, but having a tor node might be comparable to operating a ham radio relay. If someone in Moscow transmitted RT encrypted over radio and decrypts it in Germany, the radio relay wouldn't necessarily be in violation.

We live in a networked world. There's an unbroken physical connection between your hardwired ISP connection and every device connected to Russia (less so with starlink and woman and 5g, but still. )

It's resilient by design, and damaging that, even for good reasons, has secondary consequences.

Going after tor nodes would be overreaching and shortsighted.

WiMax* not woman, oops.

In cases like this the government would have to prove the intention to circumvent the RT ban which is pretty much impossible in the case of tor.

This sections is essentially targeting people who would for example start a "not-rt.eu" broadcasting rt content.

Instead the more important question is whether people running tor have to take measures to block access to RT as they may be ISPs.

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