Another police raid in Germany
forum.torproject.org
forum.torproject.org
I ran a few exits for about about ~5 years. In those 5 years, my hosting provider (DigitalOcean) received 3 subpoenas for my account information.
The first two were random. The 1st one was someone sent a bomb threat email to a university. The 2nd one was someone sending a phishing email.
The last and final subpoena was the most serious one. Some nation-state hackers from Qatar had ended up using my exit IP to break into some email accounts belonging to people they were interested in and spied upon them and stole some info.
Thankfully both the Tor Project and the EFF were able to help me pro-bono. The EFF lawyer that was assigned to me helped me fight this subpoena but ultimately we had to turn over my account information to the DOJ + I had to give an affidavit stating that I was simply just an operator and nothing on the server in question would be useful to their investigation (by design).
The stress of having to deal with law enforcement, lawyers, and having to entertain the possibility of having my home raided over something so silly ultimately led to me finally shutting down my exits.
Even though I had all of my exits using a reduced exit policy and I would blacklist known malicious IPs and c2/malware infra from being able to use it, I was still a target.
I feel law enforcement realizes this is a big weakness they can target since a lot of Tor exit operators are individuals with not a lot of resources to fight them. They can use the legal system to scare operators into shutting down.
I one day hope to resume running exits as I find it rewarding to be able to help people from around the world in a small way.
That's why they requested my personal account information, billing info, IPs that I logged into DO with, all of that.
If not interrupted by me getting the help of the amazing EFF lawyers, the next step after getting my personal information, could have been to raid my home and seize all my electronics. I work from home and would have been greatly disrupted and not been able to work without my computers and etc. Then I'd have to wait months/years to be found innocent and then get all of my electronics back + spend thousands on lawyers.
During all of this, the EFF lawyers straight up told me to prepare my home as if it were to be raided and encrypt all my devices.
Thankfully it did not come to that.
Nearly every major site ends up either totally blocking anything that comes from a Tor relay, or applying massive numbers of weird CAPTCHAs and restrictions, so it's getting to be basically unusable anyway.
Isn't that I2P[1]?
(1) TOR exit node operators are buffers to protect people from being hacked. A hacker would more easily use TOR than need the effort to runa scan for vulnerable routers, root one, and hop between various routers.
Which implies
(2) if TOR had no exit nodes and/or clearnet service blocked TOR ranges, hackers will just resort to hacking routers / other systems / botnets to make their own proxy. Now the block doesn't work, someone(s) got hacked, TOR is gone.
Basically TOR as a "containment" system. Seems to me that would be preferable for law enforcement, particularly because some state actors (https://www.infosecinstitute.com/resources/general-security/...) are putting great effort into unmasking TOR, making it a great honeypot. Ironic that Germany prosecuted a German exit node when they were the same ones investing heavily in unmasking it!
If you had visited any of my exit nodes via port 80 or 443, I had a lander on them stating that it was a Tor exit node and to please contact me if you wanted your IP to be blacklisted from it. I also stated that there was no useful information contained on this server (by design) that would be helpful for any evidence gathering or investigations. Seriously, all they had to do was plug my IP into a browser or do a simple scan of it but I suppose that's asking too much from LE lol.
Additionally, Tor exit nodes are public and all they had to do was look into my IP more than 5 seconds after finding it in logs somewhere and firing off a warrant or subpoena for it. The first two were straight up vague templated fishing expeditions. The 3rd subpoena actually came straight from the DOJ and was a lot more detailed and serious.
They should know what Tor is and know that any Tor server contains ZERO info that would be able to assist them in whatever they are attempting to investigate.
Sure, I do think such situations require follow-up but as soon as they are informed it's a Tor ip, they should know to drop any pursuit of getting evidence from it. They do not, they continue to go after you via legal means. Even though I had the EFFs help, this entire process still took months.
It's pretty stressful to be in a situation where its lil ole me VS the entire United States government who has unlimited resources, time, and money to go after you.
I am extremely blessed to have had the EFF lawyers at my defense and will forever be a life long supporter and donor to them. They really do fight for our digital rights and can help defend you in a digital equivalent of a David versus Goliath situation.
I mean, yes, I'm pretty sure "just take my word for it" is asking too much of LE.
We can always say "Come back with a warrant" but then sometimes they'll come back with a warrant.
> They should know what Tor is and know that any Tor server contains ZERO info
Unless, of course, one has misconfigured it... Which could be the case. Definitely the kind of thing LEO can figure out on the other side of a seize-and-strip of the hardware. Unfortunately, I think the only way to not be a part of the story here is to not be a part of the story here... Don't proxy anonymous traffic if you don't want law enforcement asking after the anonymous traffic you proxied. Otherwise, expect the responsibility imposed upon a service provider (since you're providing a service).
Other ISPs avoid this scrutiny by going out of their way to be helpful to law enforcement.
One day I will resume but in the future :)
It would in fact be negligent if the police did not properly investigate the server/computer/house of the device.
Like the OP says, it's harrassment to discourage continued operation.
To have some sort of automated process in place to deflect blame allows an exit node operator to ignore the real damage their work can do. They may still decide that the good that they're doing outweighs the bad, but forcing them to see the negative consequences of shielding anyone who wants a shield has value.
I'm not suggesting people shouldn't be able to run a Tor exit node. I'm suggesting that people who run Tor exit nodes should occasionally have to a deal with a subpoena that says "your exit node was used by a criminal to hurt people in ${these ways} and we require any information you have to help apprehend the attacker."
I don't want to deprive anyone of the right to make a moral decision, but I do want them to feel the weight of the full import of that decision.
Of course there is. If I am deciding whether to dedicate resources, money and time to running a service which -
a) Helps dissidents in authoritarian regimes communicate freely
and
b) Enables bad actors to send threats and/or move CSAM around
Then that is absolutely a moral choice I need to make. It's not outside your control, you get to decide whether or not to provide the service.
Can you name a product or service for which this is not the case? Militaries use general purpose software to design weapons. Murderers use vehicles and transit systems. We don't expect the government to harass the makers of cutlery because they provided a product used in a mugging.
The distinction some people try to draw is when a higher proportion of a product's users are nefarious, but that doesn't really work either because who uses something can change over time.
If you have a society where nobody has window blinds or locks on their doors because it's a rural area and there is no one around to invade your privacy then locks will be disproportionately used by neerdowells "with something to hide", and then busybodies will claim that anyone with nothing to hide shouldn't be concealing their private spaces and anyone selling or using any privacy technology should be pressured to stop. Which sustains the status quo through external pressure even if someone does start invading everyone's privacy.
And that's what's been happening on the internet. Surveillance is the default, Cloudflare et al block Tor users as a matter of course and that drives normal people from Tor and similar technologies even though they would otherwise benefit from its use. People are told that it's the dark web where there are criminals and they shouldn't use it -- it being Tor Browser, the thing that keeps ad networks from tracking them across the internet.
Then after dispersing the normal users who would otherwise benefit from using it, people say that it has a lot of nefarious users to justify the continued harassment of anyone who does. But that's just path dependence, and there are parties interested in leading us down the garden path to mass surveillance.
Right, I could kill a person with a spoon. Still we regulate guns and not spoons, why is that?
Cost versus benefit. Steel has massive, obvious benefits. That makes its costs worth it. On the other hand, several toxic compounds have no known benefits and are tighty regulated.
You're trying to argue Tor's costs are worth its benefits. But that requires being clear-eyed about both. You can't build buildings and spaceships out of Tor. But neither can you fashion it into a gun. Unless you're arguing for solely action-based regulation, never access-based, which is its own idiotic can of worms.
Everything could be used for nefarious purposes, and I do not think that is why we should "stop having nice things".
By their logic, we should get rid of encryption, too, completely.
I'm saying that too many people in this forum are too comfortable completely ignoring the harm that Tor causes, and in order to make a good judgement call about whether to run an exit node the harms need to be surfaced. Full stop.
Everything else that you and others in this thread read into my comment is on you, not me.
Case in point.
> If not, what are the differences between Tor and IM software with E2EE?
I would never run an IM software with e2e encryption either, for the same reason. I don't want to be paying to move data that is being used to hurt people, no matter how many people I'd be benefiting in the process.
If other people come to a different decision that's entirely reasonable as long as they're cognizant of the harms caused and not in denial.
Not trying to single out the person you're responding to, but I've seen this play out many times and engaged in it previously to no effect.
I won't be surprised if there were something in US criminal code with supreme court precedents that specifically dictate the government harass in timely manners the makers of cutlery used in a mugging. There _are_ always laws. _Everything_ is regulated. Most of those regulations are reasonable.
Camera feeds, ticket records... All of that is accessible via warrant. That's probably the most salient example in this context.
Yes, quite noble. But: How many of those are there using it, and how many criminals? It's mind-boggling how people so adamantly insist on seeing this only as black-and-white, and refuse to admit that there even exists something to weigh against each other.
If all you'd need to deter law enforcement is to put a website up on your server and say that you don't have anything to do with anything happening on that server and that they shouldn't bother because there's nothing to see anyhow, a lot more criminals would do that. I'm sure they'd even put an actual exit node on their machines if that protected them from law enforcement.
It's like raiding the home of the mail carrier because someone got drugs in the mail. Sure, it could technically be that the mail carrier is also a drug dealer. But when it comes to the USPS, the identity of who delivered the contraband package is not a useful data point for investigating the crime, and acting otherwise is willful ignorance.
It doesn't have to be the actual origin for it to be useful—unless the software is specifically designed to avoid traces (i.e., Tor), there are often logs that will lead you to another IP address, which might lead you to another, which might eventually lead you to the source. It would be foolhardy for police investigating a bomb threat to not at least ask, given how many people they do in fact catch this way.
> It's like raiding the home of the mail carrier because someone got drugs in the mail.
No, in the case of OP it's like subpoenaing the local post office and asking for everything they know about where that package came from. Which is, incidentally, quite common, except that in the US the post office is a government entity that doesn't need to be subpoenaed because it has its own law enforcement agency that should have jurisdiction over the case.
There could be logging bugs in Tor that you were unaware of, or the owner could be using Tor as a cover. It would be negligent _not_ to at least check the device logs for anything useful.
The truth is that police investigations normally are restrained based on the disruption that they cause the public. Police deviate from standard operating procedure when it comes to TOR exit node operators because they want to punish and intimidate them.
They want to punish operators because the authorities are frustrated by the effectiveness of these technologies in countering the pervasive surveillance environment which the authorities take for granted.
Implying that they don’t have the capability to do this already and/or alternative means to accomplish the same thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
> Room 641A is a telecommunication interception facility operated by AT&T for the U.S. National Security Agency, as part of its warrantless surveillance program as authorized by the Patriot Act. The facility commenced operations in 2003 and its purpose was publicly revealed by AT&T technician Mark Klein in 2006.
You think they don't!?
So there's no need to seize their equipment.
Citation needed. ISPs have entire departments dedicated to cooperating with law enforcement. Comcast has a whole portal with its own subdomain specifically for handling requests from law enforcement [0]. Cox has a page detailing exactly how to send them a subpoena [1]. These guys are clearly dealing with subpoenas just like the ones OP is describing all the time.
It only seems out of the ordinary this time because it's a random person who decided to play middle-man instead of an enormous corporation with a massive legal department.
[0] https://lrc.comcast.com/lea
[1] https://www.cox.com/aboutus/policies/law-enforcement-and-sub...
That's my experience too from actually having my house raided. I had two kids in bed at the time, and the police didn't even know to expect kids in the house (both kids were over 11 years old, had birth certificates, had lived in that house all their lives and attend local schools and are darn fine students).
They didn't know. It's mind boggling to me that they could get a raid warrant without having done even the most basic (below even basic) investigation.
My opinion of police investigative competence took a 99% hit as a result.
It's a lesson my kids won't forget either.
The dirty people behind all this are in the way they run the investigations. And what way is that ? Well it’s the “organised crime investigations”. The Netherlands pushed the RIEC way of working here to Germany and Belgium. Look it up. Euriec.
The whole way of working is to do dirty tricks in an unaccountable way.
The exit nodes have been known to be the weakest part of the tor design. It has been a logical theory for a while that all exit nodes are visible to the U.S. Govt.
This is just one way they can leave a system like Tor up for their uses and also make sure anything domestically is fully visible to them.
Surely that's worse than the exit nodes?
The way I see it, the right approach is some kind of continuous communication where messages end up in fixed slots, where if no message would have gone, there'd have been a randomly generated message.
Is the burden undue?
A Tor exit node operator has made the ethical judgment call that they're doing more good than harm. That might be a reasonable position to take, but I don't think it's unreasonable for us to expect an operator to face up to exactly what it is that they are doing. I'm fully on board with any bomb threats (as just one example) leading to a subpoena on the exit node operator who shielded the threat actor, even if the answer is the same every time.
Making the decision that you're doing more good than harm requires you to fully understand the harm that you're justifying, and law enforcement subpoenaing you every single time is one way to make it very clear what it is that you're choosing.
It is fair that running an exit node might be inconvenient, maybe even to the point where consulting a lawyer is advisable, but I think we should draw a hard line at direct threats to an innocent person's liberty, livelihood, and physical safety. That kind of fear is definitely an "undue burden".
> it's clear all you're doing is running software. (Side note: I'm surprised how often attitudes on this site are at odds with the "hacker" part of "Hacker News".)
I do not view software as amoral. It's a tool, and like any tool it is an extension of myself. Software that I run is acting on my behalf, and what my software is designed to do is something that I should be held morally accountable for.
I'm not sure when the hacker ethos came to mean that "just running software" absolved you from having to account for the damage your software causes, but if that's what the hacker ethos is about then yes, you can count me out.
[0] https://techcrunch.com/2021/10/15/f12-isnt-hacking-missouri-...
Where is the presumption of guilt? A threat of violence was traced to their IP and they were served a subpoena to provide information that might lead to finding the threat actor before they actually hurt anyone. No one even accused OP of a crime, much less presumed their guilt.
Their lawyers warned them to prepare as though a raid would occur, but that's the lawyers' job: to prepare their clients for the worst just in case.
When computing became predominantly online, hackers inherited a moral dimension: the need to consider whether they are doing harm to others via what they do with the shared global network.
It's a different story when you're cobbling scraps together in your basement, and it's a different story when you're primarily phone phreaking "the man," as it were.
Yeah yeah “parents should know” but given the rash of shootings by young people, fuck that argument.
That's not what subpoenas are for, and it would be a really stupid waste of time and resources. If you really want to do that, just send them an email.
> a really stupid waste of time and resources
Subpoenas are used all the time in cases where they're not expected to be inherently useful for acquiring information. If law enforcement is going to take 10x as long to find the perp because you hid them, I don't see a problem with them sharing that burden with you a bit—there are externalities here that should be internalized.
Yes.
> A Tor exit node operator has made the ethical judgment call that they're doing more good than harm.
They are. Absolutely. It's not really a question.
> Making the decision that you're doing more good than harm requires you to fully understand the harm that you're justifying, and law enforcement subpoenaing you every single time is one way to make it very clear what it is that you're choosing.
No, that's just harassment.
That's very nice but until tor exit nodes are illegal, such police action is purely a harassment effort, right?
One thing that struck me, years ago, is that the people running these actions (recipient of a death threat or police) are far more concerned with the fact that "someone enabled this", rather than the fact that someone was angry enough at them to issue a death threat. They had no visible concern about that wannabe murderer, apparently spending no effort trying to identify THEM. They just wanted retribution against the exit node operator. It was totally doing something for the sake of doing something, zero concern about solving any root problem. They had seemingly zero concern that their safety was a risk (I mean, from eventual action stronger than a death threat.)
They also had zero awareness that anonymous email had allowed this ennemy to be revealed before any physical violence.
...
> I one day hope to resume running exits as I find it rewarding to be able to help people from around the world in a small way.
This really doesn't strike you as cognitive dissonance? I mean, yes, I get it, it's easy to construct a scenario where you're "helping people". But you're also "helping" people engage in terrorism and identity theft in exactly the same way.
Surely that deserves at least a little thought and moral calculus, no? You're not making a first principles argument about fundamental rights or anything, you're saying you run exits because it's "helping". Well, shouldn't it help more than it hurts?
Tor's feature isn't "communication" in the abstract, it's anonymity. And yes, that can be used for good or for evil. But the upthread comment was saying how nice it was to run an exit node because it was "helping people". And to the extent that's true, I think correct thinking demands you also account for the harm.
And let's be clear: Tor is definitely harmful. Almost all Tor traffic is some degree of nefarious. The tiny handful of dissidents are drowned in a sea of phishing and contraband.
> post office help people communicate coded messages about nefarious thing
The US postal service scans and stores the outside of every envelope and package they handle. Law enforcement agencies can query this metadata.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mail_Isolation_Control_and_T...
> Doesn't running a telephone network help people do the same?
They do, but they are not only share the metadata with law enforcement, but also let them wiretap. (Often they require a warrant for this, but that is not a hard burden for a LEO.) And this capability is not some aftertought, but deeply integrated into their tech stack.
We prefer they assist LEO operating under court order, instead.
I'm not going to make a value judgment on the use of tor, but I do think it's important to be honest about how it may be used.
As much as I can respect the idealism about privacy and liberty etc..., I could not ignore the fact that any "really!!!" bad actor could use the same infrastructure to avoid investigation/prosecution, therefore I did not want to provide indirectly any help.
> I feel law enforcement realizes this is a big weakness they can target since a lot of Tor exit operators are individuals with not a lot of resources to fight them. They can use the legal system to scare operators into shutting down.
On one hand I admit that that might be the case, on the other hand even government organizations/departments/agencies can be "local" and scattered (e.g. similar IT departments for each "canton" in Switzerland) and not have huge amounts of resources/knowledge to track/identify perpetrators of all ongoing (sophisticated?) IT crimes => somebody somewhere might see the same IP involved in a lot of "bad" stuff not realizing it's just a TOR node.
I hate the current general trend pushing a position of an either absolute "yes/no" for any theme, including this one (of encryption for privacy/etc vs. crime).
In my opinion it's obvious that the current situation of solutions is in general bad: too much pressure on services that provide privacy because it's too easy for crime to misuse them :o(
Well, what would be considered a "really!!!" bad actor for some might be a hero for others. Just as an example, depending on which side of the Israel/Palestine conflict you are on, either side using your node for military intelligence might be an use worth fighting for or terrible abuse.
In the end, this really comes down to whether you value freedom or state protection more; either of which can be abused by rogue actors or a malicious state, respectively. There is no win-win-solution, unfortunately.
The "really bad" people have no conscience. No qualms about compromising the device of some innocent victim and then using that as their "exit node" if Tor wasn't available. So if Tor doesn't exist, that's what they do, and that's worse. Because not only do the bad guys still get to be anonymous, now the owner of the compromised system takes the blame. Which is more likely to be someone less able than you to articulate what happened, and who has to claim they were hacked with perhaps scant evidence rather than being able to point to their IP address on the public list of Tor exit nodes. They also might not be in a country with due process. So what you're doing there isn't helping the bad guys, it's saving some of their innocent victims from being unjustly punished.
Meanwhile the "good guys" who use Tor do have a conscience, so they wouldn't do that to an innocent third party, and then without Tor they have nothing. So you'd be helping them too.
Come on, Tor main use is child pornography and drugs. If you think you’re helping oppressed journalists, it’s 99% false. You’re mostly enabling all sorts of criminal activities, from benign to major. Hosting a tor exit nod doesn’t make you a hero, quite the opposite actually.
Locks aren't for the really bad people, who are in fact going to break down the door. They prevent crimes of convenience.
But Tor is the lock, and the crimes of convenience would be e.g. mass surveillance of the population, in the event that ordinary people don't have it. So it's not clear what you're arguing here. That everyone should use Tor?
> Tor main use is child pornography and drugs. If you think you’re helping oppressed journalists, it’s 99% false.
Start here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41507790
Add to this, the illegal stuff isn't accessed via exit nodes, which link into the ordinary internet. Those things use hidden services, which are internal to the network and don't use exit nodes.
But let's even explore the premise. Suppose a lot of the traffic is people trading in illegal materials. Well, that's not really a big problem; people do that stuff via several other existing channels and the societal cost of each instance of someone buying pot over the internet isn't very high. Whereas the societal benefit of one single whistleblower is massive. These things can change the lives of millions of people. So even if it's 99% contraband, the remaining 1% is ten million times as valuable.
Quoth Fidel Castro: ¿Armas para qué? (What do you need guns for?)
Guess what he did after he took the people's guns
You try to paint me as a "purist" that would allow the world to fall into the worst abusive governments just to save 1 child, but if you look at it honestly, you are at least as purist as me, because you would enable arbitrary amount of crimes just to save 1 journalist.
Assuming my 99% is accurate, the numbers are really not in your favor, plus journalists are grown adults that make their own choices, while children don’t chose to risk being abused, filmed and exposed online.
Yeah, sure. But now you're talking statistics, which is rather irrelevant in a discussion on principles.
You also may notice that in most civilized countries we do stop at somewhat weak keys and glass windows and don't bother with fortifying each house to withstand a full on assault from a criminal organization. That's because this will have a very high cost and we are better off dealing with criminals in other ways so this lack of protection is not a real concern.
> relies on the perspective of the participant though > Parents point is that ‘bad’ is a matter of perspective, and that right or wrong,
Not really, though. Some things are just 'bad' (you or the perpetrator might not agree but that doesen't change that fact).
The problem with a "no shades of grey" stance is that in any large organised group there are going to be some good points and reasonable ideologies for why they have banded together to do what they do. They may be mistaken on important points, and it certainly may be necessary to put all empathy aside and try to ruthlessly crush them regardless of any good points they have - but in practice that approach almost always leads to terrible results compared to negotiating to emphasise the good and suppress the bad. Take ISIS - the reason we have groups like ISIS running around is generally because of a no-shades-of-grey approach taken to deal with their precursors. The US policy in the Middle East typically destabilises things (although they are hardly alone in doing that).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_relations_of_North_Kor... - "Results of the 2017 BBC World Service poll. Views of North Korean Influence by country"
Here's the thing: I am not on either side of that conflict, or likely any other conflict you could use as an example. There are atrocities committed by both sides. There are victims on both sides. You could argue over who committed the worse atrocities or over who is the biggest victim until your face turns blue, it isn't going to end the cycle of violence as long as there are people facilitating that violence.
And no, I am not naive. I know there are people out there who care nothing about causes beyond their own self interest and who care nothing about their victims. I realize that these people are impossible to combat without the innocent coming in harms way. Yet the moment we fail to be ashamed of the harm we cause in the name of the cause, the moment we fail to acknowledge who is being harmed in the name of the cause, is the moment we become no better than them.
Lots of horrible dictators have used rhetoric like yours to rationalize/facilitate their actions.
The fact of the matter is, there really is no absolute objective moral compass; and yes, that includes "we should just stop facilitating violence" because you absolutely can be enabling others to take advantage of that to cause more harm.
You have to pick a stance and live with the harm that comes out of it (yes, whichever stance you pick, will cause harm).
Realistically, I am unlikely to help since I am unlikely to understand the circumstances and I am especially unlikely to understand who I am aiding. Revolutionaries often look noble (or try to look noble) until they are in power and show their true colours.
Operating an exit node is something that I would be unwilling to do since it goes beyond possibly facilitating those who would want to do harm, it is pretty much a guarantee of facilitating those who would do harm.
> The fact of the matter is, there really is no absolute objective moral compass; and yes, that includes "we should just stop facilitating violence" because you absolutely can be enabling others to take advantage of that to cause more harm.
While I agree that there is no absolute objective moral compass, we each have a moral compass. We have to live by them. Will other people exploit those morals to their advantage. Undoubtedly. That doesn't mean we ignore those morals. Personally, I draw the line at facilitating violence.
If we're talking about the decision to actually run an exit node, I disagree with this breakdown of the ethics. I can value freedom more than state protection in the abstract while at the same time not feeling that helping support freedom in Russia and China and Iran is worth the cost of simultaneously helping to shield perpetrators of violence closer to home.
In most people's ethical frameworks choosing not to run a Tor node does not make me culpable for the actions of a state suppressing its people, but choosing to run one does make me at least somewhat complicit in shielding the perp of a bomb threat.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Postal_Inspect...
This is again a forced binary "and/or"-decision, without anything inbetween.
It doesn't have to be like that - both can coexist, if both terms are not extreme.
(disclosure: my post is not related in any way to Israel nor Palestine and I'm personally not linked in/directly to anything related to Israel nor Palestine and this post is not related to the current conflict)
The problem is when you choose to involve yourself in nation-state conflicts they’re just not going to care about your protestations of neutrality and freedom. They’re just going to see you aiding their enemy.
Stepping back though neither side in that conflict needs Tor. They both have numerous supporters in other countries where that support is legal. They can send and receive information through trusted outside supporters including some outside governments. They just need secure communication channels to a few representatives among those supporters rather than something is general as Tor.
I want to argue for freedom, on the grounds that most people know whats best for themselves better than others, so on balance there should be more people using that freedom for good, but then most people are busy, and not as motivated or knowledgable of how to use that freedom as the malicious actors are.. so is that even freedom in the end?
You ... do not read much about history, I guess from this.
The thing is, we absolutely don't tolerate this with infrastructure. We have entire systems in place to make sure that we can find people who use our infrastructure to kill people. The USPS has its own entire law enforcement branch whose sole job is to track down people who misuse the mail. I'm sure there are processes in the UK for the same.
With our infrastructure there's some non-zero amount of abuse that we acknowledge we won't be able to prevent in order to make everything work without infinite enforcement cost, but we don't just close our eyes to the abuse and not even try to do anything about it at all.
The difference between the post office and Tor is that Tor is very specifically designed to make tracking a sender of a bomb threat impossible. State-run postal services at least try to have an audit trail for what they send.
I don't know the correct balance. maybe it's just an impossible problem. I just don't think the two sides are freedom vs state protection.
Would being gay count? In some countries it's a death sentence, so using TOR is how they avoid being thrown off a roof or stoned. Talking about anything LGB is a crime.
What about someone who wants to read 1984.. Would you be okay with them committing that crime?
Decentralization is not an excuse for negligence. Anyone working in cybercrimes should be aware that Tor exists and of what it is. The list of exit nodes is public. Harassing the operators can only be one of malice or incompetence and neither alternative is excusable.
Exactly
Making an analogy, I feel these people are kinda the European ideological equivalents of the "sovereign citizens" in the US (though sure, they're usually more informed)
In one way, deeply concerned about very legitimate worries of free speech and privacy. In another way, very naive about what happens in the real world or how legal process works
Expectations: "We're helping people fight dictators!11" Reality: 80% malicious usage, 10% "just a prank bro", 5% people with legitimate uses and then the rest
"Wir schaffen das"
The law failed here and it is a typical problem for Germany, that historically and still today has problems with liberties in general.
FUD doesn't mean we should do away with liberty. To say otherwise is naive idealism that requires infallible human actors in security related agencies. That is impossible.
This shows how easily TOR can be abused, even for small misdeeds.
Law enforcement are blaming the road builders, that's what's wrong with the picture.
I stopped running an exit node when I looked at the traffic flowing through it. I even sslstripped it back when that was much easier.
No freedom fighters. No oppressed journalists. No free speech.
Only porn and scams.
Running a Tor exit node for freedom is like burning a village to save it or enriching your own uranium to solve the energy crisis.
There's gotta be an answer, but this ain't it.
I wonder what you expected?
Alternatively, why don't we become lawyers, too?
They would know the full extent of the inconveniences regarding home raids and device seizures for long periods of time. This would disrupt their lives, work, and probably affect their ability to serve their clients’ legal troubles.
At the very least, I’m thankful for the efforts of the EFF and others that do know the law and help. But I’d imagine there’s a good case for separations of concerns here. Stay out of the legal troubles yourself so you can help others that do get caught up in it. One degree away.
https://docs.digitalocean.com/products/droplets/details/poli...:
> We do not specifically disallow Tor exit nodes, but as the account holder, you are responsible for all the traffic going through your Droplet (including traffic that an exit node may generate), and we do prohibit some of the traffic types that may go through a typical Tor exit node.
> If you are unable to stop prohibited traffic like torrents, spam, SSH probes, botnets, and DDoS attacks, running a Tor exit node may lead to us suspending or terminating your account. We send you an email in the event of a violation of our Terms of Service, and you must address these issues as soon as possible.
Running Tor exit node without abuse? How is that possible? Since they didn’t shut you down after three abuses serious enough to get law enforcement involved, I guess they don’t really give a shit about abuse after all.
It seemed likely that it would be the horrible use cases it would benefit the most.
Balancing an increase in the efficiency of doing good things that could already by done other ways against greatly benefiting horrible use cases made it so that I could not morally justify it.
There is room for a middle ground that will make nobody happy: a safe harbor for exit-node operators who (a) blacklist (or actively report) connections to a set of IPs and (b) maintain some semblance of logs and provide them when served with a warrant.
The case for the operator is it lets them help show that the offending traffic came from TOR. Presumably, it should also assist law enforcement to some degree. And I don't think someone having e.g. 60 days' exit logs materially damages TOR's privacy.
This is not why.
> As a consequence, I am personally no longer willing to provide my personal address&office-space as registered address for our non-profit/NGO as long as we risk more raids by running exit nodes.
This is why. It's basically a textbook example of a chilling effect.
It only takes one person in LE to request to investigate this IP, and a single judge that isn't entirely convinced that it will be worthless to try to sign it off.
If parts of the state wanted to harass operators systematically or organize to discourage TOR, they could do much worse.
https://www.transparency.de/aktuelles/detail/article/eugh-ur...
it is beginning to get much worse ...
"Why you need balls of steel to operate a tor exit node"
http://web.archive.org/web/20100414224255/http://calumog.wor...
The above is within the context of a western legal system, and certainly since it was written domestic law enforcement has become even more militarized and aggressive. I would be absolutely unsurprised if the same thing happened today and it resulted in a battering ram on the door at 0400 in the morning, flashbang grenades and the house being rampaged through by a SWAT team.
3 years probation and 30.000€ fine.
My assumption is that Germany has some sort of common-carrier privileges for Tor node operators. In America, telecoms can't be sued for facilitating illegal activity. But they do have to assist law enforcement with finding criminals when requested.
Would be happy to hear from someone who is more knowledgeable in this area.
How do ISPs operate legally? Every single thing that's ever been done over a Tor relay has crossed multiple ISPs.
I described exactly that in my second paragraph.
... or at least there never was in the past. The new wave of stupid and extremely broad "duty of care" laws that try to apply to the design of any and every communication service may change that. But it hasn't been litigated anywhere.
I imagine for tor, the reason is that there are also good uses for tor. However i dont think "i intentionally know nothing" works as a defence in general.
Ianal
"Facilitation" as an offense in itself is one of those things that tends to be a real thing, but varies a lot depending on the jurisdiction. In most places, most of the time, you're only going to get in trouble for facilitating crime if your service is especially set up to be unusually useful for crime. You're especially vulnerable if you specifically designed it for crime. If those things apply, then knowing it's being used for crime (but not necessarily on which specific occasions) can make it worse for you. Give or take, depending on where you live.
In the past, Tor nodes, even exit nodes, have mostly gotten a pass, at least in countries where most of them are located. They get raided all the time, but largely as cases of mistaken identity. That's probably because most Tor traffic has historically probably been people trying to hide from ad tracking or people worried about their perfectly legal activities being spied on. So it's hard to say the service is really aimed at illegal activity.
Things are tightening up worldwide, in statute and probably in case law, mostly because of Tor and other services possibly being swept in by standards primarily aimed at social media. We may start seeing Tor nodes targeted because Tor is now considered "too adapted to legal activity", or even because node operators are "not doing enough to prevent" illegal activity (including redesigning the system if necessary).
But until fairly recently that's been more what you'd expect to see in North Korea than what you'd expect to see in Germany (or the US).
It sounds like Germany extends some sort of carrier protection to Tor exit node operators. E.g. if someone organizes a drug deal over the phone, Verizon is not liable. But Verizon does have to meet some minimum standards of records keeping and law enforcement assistance (wire tapping).
Perhaps the most famous example is DMCA: [Google] is exempt from liabilities for hosting pirated movies on [YouTube] by US laws, on condition that it's not actively involved with it and fully robotic with takedowns.
It's not like courts treat popular businesses like buses and ISPs as sceneries just by gut feeling. There are always laws.
This largely conforms with how the first telecoms received immunity for abuse of their services. They retain logs and assist the government with investigations, and in exchange they are shielded from liability. WhatsApp and iMessage would probably cooperate to the same extent, minus wire-tapping messages in transit (because they can't). That's vastly greater cooperation than a tor exit node operator that retains no logs.s
How do you expect further fruitful dialogue?
It's best to assume the government is a hostile, rabid actor who will seize any reachable assets and your freedom at any point they wish and proceed accordingly.
They could keep logs, but they choose not to. They are intentionally unhelpful.
The reason they aren't keeping logs is not for the privacy of others.
If I run an exit node, I know I am not reading the logs to garner personal information of others. And unless someone hacks my server and goes through the logs, which is extremely unlikely, noone else will read the logs either.
The only one reading the logs would be law enforcement.
By not keeping logs, you are intentionally hindering law enforcement.
This is why I keep a diary indicating every single person I've ever interacted with, along with the date, time and place. It's a pain to do so and it takes up a lot of storage space and it makes people wary about interacting with me but I'd certainly never want to hinder law enforcement.
It is not a "pain" to set up logging. Most non-tor proxies implement logging. It would be a completely reasonable task for the tor project to implement logging by default.
No one would be any more "wary" to interact with your tor node. Trusting your node not to log would be foolish anyway. So whether you make known that you are logging, or whether you claim not to log (but might secretly do anyway) doesn't make much of a difference.
The storage space a log takes up is negligible (unless you keep logs for unreasonably long times) on anything but the smallest systems. And since running a tor node takes quite a bit of processing power, you won't be running your node on a system that can't handle a few megabytes of logs.
The perspective is that in order for these actions to be ethical, you must log the traffic, or you should not bother setting up the node. It's irresponsible to setup the node (which takes some amount of effort) but not do the precautionary part which makes it ethical.
You can believe otherwise if you'd like, but this is an ethical framework applied to many other parts of our society and it's the thing that sets you apart from the ISPs, and generally it's the thing accepted by the public at large.
It is legal to keep some logs for a limited amount of time if you run an IT service in Germany, mostly for the purpose of keeping the service running properly. If you have that data, you can give it to LE when they request it.
The thing accepted by the public at large is often codified within a country's laws. German laws generally do not require you to store logs if you are an ISP. Storing them for too long can even be unlawful. There is no so called Vorratsdatenspeicherung anymore, and it is a recurring topic of political debate. So at least in Germany, the public view on storing data is more complex, and people don't believe not storing data or reducing the amount of data stored is clearly immoral when running IT services. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datenvermeidung_und_Datenspars...
On another note, if LE requests you to log specific access patterns in advance, you might have to do it. If your ISP services are really big (lots of users), you might even have to provide some sort of interface for LE. IMO and under certain interpretations of the involved laws, the German state could ask every single node operator in Germany to log everything, but the political backlash would be quite high.
Please add /s or the links or both.
Chalmers sent a copy of his timeline to Premier Park Ltd, the company that charged him with the crimes, and the defendant was able to prove his innocence. The charges against him were dropped.[1]
the lawyer met with the detective in order to show him screenshots of McCoy’s Google location history, including data recorded by RunKeeper. The maps showed months of bike rides past the burglarized home, NBC News reports.[2]
2: https://news.sophos.com/en-us/2020/03/10/google-data-puts-in...
I was not making any moral judgement on people operating tor nodes.
I was simply stating that you are, in fact, hindering law enforcement if you set up a non-logging proxy for the purposes of hindering law enforcement.
Whether that's a good or a bad thing is up to you to decide. Clearly many people think it's a good thing; good enough to go through the efforts of setting up a proxy.
I think it differs because tor is specifically created to protect against surveillance; both private surveillance and state surveillance (a.k.a. law enforcement).
If a shop was actively helping people avoid surveillance, I would expect them to actively assist law enforcement, too.
I find it perfectly reasonable to consider people who actively help a project which advertises on its website that it is being used to protect against state surveillance / law enforcement to be hindering law enforcement.
Some tech companies have extremely sophisticated observability which dumps huge volumes data about the internal state of a program. Some companies have very limited observability beyond maybe logging "we just served a request". Your argument suggests that companies who don't have the extensive logs of the former are being intentionally unhelpful?
There are lots of reasons to not keep logs – lack of storage space, additional economic cost of doing so, slower response times due to overhead of observability, etc.
You are implying that by not keeping records of all events you are involved with you are intentionally hindering law enforcement, implying that we are morally and legally bound to gather and retain information which helps law enforcement.
Does that make clearing browser history a deliberate attempt to hinder law enforcement?
Internet cafe's wipe the computers after every session. Is that intentionally hindering law enforcement?
The difference between your examples and logging proxy access is that logging proxy access is the standard behavior (for proxies which aren't tor).
Tor proxies deliberately decide to behave in a non-standard manner. And with what tor is about, it is clear that this is not for technical reasons but for hindering law enforcement.
I will claim that if the tor project did not openly intend to make government surveillance more difficult, it would have implemented logging long ago.
But that's just a claim, not a fact. Maybe I'm wrong.
Aren't there valid reasons for people not to conceal or anonymize their communications, such as whistleblowers, journalists, or people needing to hide their communications from oppressive governments?
On the issue of clearing browser history are you aware that the FBI threatened a boy for clearing his browser history under laws intended for destruction of corporate documents and communications?
Keeping logs doesn't help other goverments. Other governments cannot access your logs. Your government can access your logs. You are protecting them from your government. You may claim that your government is oppressive. But that doesn't change that you are hindering the enforcement of their (oppressive) laws.
Regarding the moral question: I agree that there are cases where hindering your own government's law enforcement may make sense.
Regarding tor, I mostly take issue with the concept of onion services. If you want to publish USA government secrets, you can publish them on Russian servers. If you want to publish Russian government secrets, you can publish them on American servers, etc. The sole purpose of onion services is to publish content which is illegal in every country on earth. I can't think of many good things that are ollegal in every country on earth.
I mean, exit node operators are being intentionally unhelpful? They're intentionally helping people who don't want to be tracked. "I don't want to give you the papers" and "I can't give you the papers because I burned them so that I couldn't give them to anybody" are equivalent morally; the only difference is that the latter is irreversible.
There are good reasons to not want to be tracked, but there are also bad reasons to not want to be tracked. Exit node operators have chosen to help both. Police on the whole tend not to be the kinds of people who understand the "good reasons not to want to be tracked" thing.
There are other differences. One is after the fact, the other is a decision made before the fact; one is specific (rejecting that request in particular), the other is general (all requests of that type are guaranteed to be affected equally).
It's the same with, for instance, email retention policies. We accept that old messages are irrevocably deleted after X days, even when we require them to be produced once requested if they still exist.
Indeed it is. The intention and moral purpose of email deletion policies is to reduce the risk of embarrassing or incriminating emails being turned up as part of a lawsuit or investigation -- in other words, to be unhelpful.
The legal justification for being unhelpful in both cases is that "this is just policy, we're treating everyone the same". That doesn't change the fact that in both cases the intent was to be unhelpful to investigators.
I have long retention policies for things and life cycles for others. Information shouldn’t be permanently available to me if it’s not relevant or it’s a waste of resources.
With Tor Hidden Service there's no exit node as such since traffic terminates inside the Tor network. The networking route is doubly anonymized so both the server and the client can't track each other down.
1. Bob is running a Tor exit node.
2. Charlie is a government official investigating illegal content (use your imagination)
3. Charlie downloads illegal content via Tor
4. This content is sent to Charlie from Bob's exit node.
5. Charlie observes that Bob's exit node sent him illegal content.
I understand that even if Bob is raided and his computer searched, they cannot find the website hosting the illegal content. But Charlie would know that Bob helped deliver the illegal content. Tor Hidden Service does not anonymize the exit node from the client.
Charlie could only see the machine in the final step of requesting the illegal content it Charlie was hosting the hidden service themselves. These requests can come from many different Tor operators not just exit nodes.
Host -> Node 1 -> Node 2 -> ... Bob -> Charlie
this obfuscates the Host from Charlie. But Charlie knows that Bob sent him illegal content. Yes, Bob didn't host the content. The host is obfuscated. But Bob is still delivering illegal content and Charlie knows it.
Guard Relays usually don't have these issues, since you have to be somewhat technical to actively probe relays by requesting content through tor. And technical people know there isn't any point to rading an operator's home.
Does BOB know they are delivering illegal content?
No... is it even possible to send unencrypted traffic by Tor? If it's even possible, Charlie must be the only person in the world doing it.
He does when Charlie knocks on his door and informs him that he delivered CSE to him. Ignorance of the fact that one is breaking the law is rarely accepted as a defense. Carriers usually get this protection when when meet some standards of safeguards and cooperation with law enforcement.
Taking the wrong jacket by mistake is not theft, and operating the exit node through which someone downloads CSAM is not criminal possession of CSAM or knowing facilitation thereof.
That rarely happens in practice because prosecutors are usually pretty good at their jobs, and tend not to bring cases they can't prove.
Back to our Tor example: if you've been repeatedly told by the government that your node is being used for illegal activity, it's hard to plead ignorance.
A look at federal drug distribution statutes in the USA[0] shows the mental state used for most of the forbidden acts is "intentionally" or "knowingly". Other jurisdictions could have different laws, but in the USA, it does appear the prosecutor has to prove that a drug mule knew what they were doing.
Similarly, the federal statute in the USA criminalizing distribution and transmission of child pornography[1] says "knowingly". Someone operating an ISP, an internet router, a VPN, or an exit node has no obligation (and often no ability) to inspect the data they're transmitting to find out if it contains child pornography, and knowing that there's a certain probability a given amount of random traffic contains some does not trigger criminal liability because the operator does not know that any particular data is child pornography.
In another comment you mentioned that ISPs can aid law enforcement because they know details about their customers. They usually do for billing purposes, but in many jurisdictions they're not required to. There is not, to my knowledge a KYC law in the USA for providing internet service.
Imagine the government tells the mule that their employer is shipping dugs in these packages, and the mule still tries to claim that they didn't know that they might be transporting drugs.
The EU Chatcontrol proposal seeks to change that in some cases (TOR exit nodes not among them), and most people here are vehemently opposed to it.
Is there some mechanism that prevents Charlie from knowing who sent the content to him? Fundamentally, you can't stop the government from sniffing at the endpoint. Because they're not really "sniffing" they're just requesting content like any normal Tor user.
That is, in fact, the whole point of Tor. In the hidden service case, neither end can identify the other.
Host -> Node 1 -> Node 2 -> .... -> Bob -> Charlie.
Charlie doesn't know where the Host is. But Charlie does know that Bob sent him illegal content. Or is that final link, from Bob to Charlie, also obfuscated somehow? If so, how did OP get raided by police if he's supposed to be hidden?
1. Charlie is running a client and downloads something. In which case Bob is an entrance node, not an exit node, but it's essentially the same thing. Charlie does know that the next hop is Bob. Depending on whether the ultimate destination is a hidden service or on the clearnet, Charlie may or may not know who's running that service.
2. Charlie is running a hidden service, and somebody uploads something. Charlie knows that it came via Bob, but doesn't know where it came from.
3. Charlie is running a regular clearnet Web server, and somebody uploads something to Charlie via Bob's exit node. Again Charlie sees that the traffic comes from Bob.
In the first two cases, Charlie has to be actually running the Tor software, and knowingly using Tor. So Charlie also knows that (a) Bob is just a relay, (b) Bob doesn't actually host the content, (c) Bob doesn't handle more than a packet or two of the content at a time, and deletes those as soon as they've been relayed, (d) Bob doesn't know, and can't find out, what the content actually is, (e) Bob doesn't know, and can't find out, where the content originally came from, and (f) Bob is really unlikely to keep any record of the whole connection after the session is over, which means probably no more than 10 minutes or so.
If that's enough to go after Bob, then it's enough to go after Bob... but historically it hasn't been. Bob can reasonably claim not only that he doesn't know what that particular traffic was, but that, although he knows there's probably some illegal traffic, most of the traffic he relays is probably legal.
In the third case, it looks to Charlie like Bob is the ultimate user. Unless Charlie does some investigation, Charlie may go raid Bob. But Charlie should then find out all that other stuff.
I think the most common actual case is that Charlie is running a honey pot, either as a hidden service or on the clearnet, and somebody gets the content from Charlie via Bob. But the same basic ideas apply.
The main issue isn't that Charlie doesn't know what the content is, but that Bob doesn't.
[Oh, and on edit, just to be clear: In the first two cases, that "packet or two" that Bob may ephemerally buffer is encrypted so that Bob can't read it, nor can any other relay. In the third case, where Charlie is a clearnet service, the end user is usually still using TLS, so Bob still can't read it. And none of the non-exit relays can read it no matter what.]
But at the end of the day Charlie, the government agent, is catching Bob in the act of delivering illegal content.
Imagine a government agent buys drugs on the dark web and arrests the courier. The courier protests, "I didn't know it was drugs, I didn't ask what was in the package". Do you think that defense is going to keep the courier out of prison?
It sounds like Germany is treating Tor operators as common carriers, and not holding them liable for content they delivery. They're being quite generous in that regard, in most countries the node operators are probably not met with such leniency.
I, recently, bought a computer mouse from an online shop. The courier who brought me the package had no idea it contained a computer mouse. It might have been listed on the manifest outside the package, but even then, the courier had no way of knowing whether that was true without opening the package.
So, yes, I do think that defense can keep the courier out of prison.
Well, yes, otherwise FedEx and UPS would quickly go out of business.
Juries aren't stupid, they're not going to buy it when the courier says, "I just saw this online ad for deliveries on the dark web. Sure, it paid way more than normal delivery jobs but that's not cause for suspicion, right?"
And that's exactly what a tor node is doing: delivering content from the dark web. As far as I'm concerned, Germany is being very generous in its decision to let these operators continue to operate despite knowing full well that they are enabling criminal activity.
Yes. That happens every day.
> It sounds like Germany is treating Tor operators as common carriers,
That's probably because they basically are common carriers. And the service isn't particularly designed for illegal activity, even it can be useful for that. It's especially not designed for activities that tend to be illegal in the "free world".
> in most countries the node operators are probably not met with such leniency.
The Tor network has been running for about 20 years. There are on the order of thousands of relays. Unlike users, relay operators aren't anonymous; there's a public list of their IP addresses. The relays are all over most of Europe, especially Western Europe, and the Americas, especially the US and Canada, with a not-insignificant number of them in other countries.
So far as I know, nobody's ever been arrested, let alone convicted, for running a Tor relay. If they have, it's been in the sort of country where you also get arrested for running a newspaper. That may change soon, but it's still the case so far. Oh, and a good chunk of the funding for development (but not relay operation) comes from the US government.
You say "leniency", I say "not being an authoritarian hellhole".
If someone leveraged your employment services to commit crime, would you consider yourself having facilitated illegal activity?
I have no idea where the line is, but like we dont charge art supply stores with facilitating forgery, so some amount of bad usage is clearly acceptable.
Measure of purposes, 'legit or otherwise', is not a law for anything ever.
But regardless, in both systems i am very certain your purpose ("intent") matters a lot. (Details depend on the specific crime in question)
USC has extraterritorial power about everywhere but NK, Russia, and Iran either formally or through influence.
:%s/USC/law/g
I distinctly believe you do not care to better understand the reality and the nuance, however.
What part are you surprised isn't forbidden? The part where it accepts connections anonymously? The part where data is encrypted in transit?
Exit node operators, like telecoms can be required to tell law enforcement everything they know about a user. The difference is they don't know anything of value.
Raids on homes for trivialities are common place, there is basically no legal protection against that. This shows a state that is a bit overwhelmed with its primary affairs and the country itself is not a dependable partner for protection of basic rights.
if you use Tor you already know what's going on. onion routing didn't save anyone from anything in 20 years. the evils Tor enabled often seem to trace back to the very states and establishments who manage and tolerate them. drug cartels run several of the governments Tor ostensibly protects users from, and human trafficking is within a degree of most western establishments in every direction, from "NGOs" to intelligence operations to the sex trade.
if you want privacy, tech is an inferior solution. make nations that protect it.
What nations have you made?
there's quite a list and tbh, I can probably afford the humility.
Hard to imagine even a single would-be organizer who got side-quested into zealously advocating for Tor.
On the other hand-- easy to imagine many digital utopianists who on principle don't organize in the sense you mean, and some of them zealously advocating for Tor.
In particular, the campaigns and efforts of those organizers are undermined and attacked through pervasive surveillance.
Tor is not a substitute for political organizing, in this age it's a necessary precursor.
Tor (and privacy tech) has become more like a substitute activity, like being a vegan or recycling plastic where it separates and isolates more than it organizes, and is mostly an empty ritual.
The people affecting the most political change (for better or worse) aren't using Tor, they are using foundations, PACs, unions, charities, churches, and organizing in the open to seize control of political offices. While you were worried about whether your posts are being read by the NSA, they've been flying around in private jets and doing press conferences.
Here is a good talk by Roger Dingledine, the original author of tor dispelling common myths and giving some statistics on its real world usage: https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?v=Di7qAVidy1Y
And for good measure,
It's Tor not TOR: https://support.torproject.org/#about_why-is-it-called-tor
They're going to assume until proven otherwise (by first confiscating all your electronics and sending them to a digital forensics lab to analyze them for 6-12 months) that some person who is physically present at that exact location is engaged in CSAM/CP or malicious/illegal activity.
Presumably still worth checking out in case a criminal is running a tor node as cover, but at the same time it seems unlikely someone is both technical enough to run a tor node but also doesn't bother covering their tracks.
So I was specifically told by a detective.
*Australia has laws that requires ISPs to keep metadata for at least two years.
Yes, my intention was to say that it'll get their attention, but as a single data point won't justify a raid.
The detective said it to me as part of the conversation in which I was told I could collect my seized equipment, and it was said in a way that implied they thought I was still "guilty" despite the fact they found nothing incriminating in the multiple terabytes of data they seized.
The other (laughable) 'red flag data points' the detective mentioned were:
- The usage of virtual machines
- Having downloaded items from MEGA
Incredibly low bars for suspicion if you ask me, but then I know a bare minimum about technology...
I believe URLs are captured where it's possible for them to be captured.
I think a court warrant is needed before the ISP records can be accessed.
What ASIO can do, however, may be a different story.
I assume they'd usually be following backwards from an IP address, e.g., in some investigation they've raided some server logs and found a connection from an IP address, and they'd then go to the ISP to get the name/address of the subscriber. They seem to do this quite frequently.
Interesting (cherry-picked for maximum outrage) excerpts:
In a report tabled in parliament by the Ombudsman in February 2021 (covering the period from 1 July 2018 to 30 June 2019) all agencies investigated were found to have accessed Australians’ metadata without the proper authorisation. “We identified instances at all inspections in 2018-19 where agencies had accessed telecommunications data without proper authority. As such, the disclosure of the data was unauthorised,”.
The committee heard that while mandatory data-retention laws permit just 21 agencies to access the metadata, more than 87 other entities — including councils, the Victorian Institute of Education, the RSPCA and the South Australian fisheries department — have used section 280 to gain access.
(Unrelated side note: this is the same country wanting to be given backdoor keys to encrypted communications).
[1] - https://archive.is/LDTL8
- This IP had malicious activity or is otherwise relevant to a (maybe complicated) case
- It says "tor" on a landing page, or in WHOIS, or the IP is on the public list of nodes
Some things to consider:
- All kinds of other servers, services or proxies could also be running on or behind this IP
- The node could be misconfigured in a variety of ways to keep forensic traces, even being a VM that is being snapshotted regularly
- Some lunatic could be running an exit on his personal machine, but just coincidentally to the observed criminal activity
- A high percentage of nodes is malicious, keeps logs, mines data, poisons traffic and tries opportunistic TLS stripping (those poor, naive souls clicking the warning away...)
Not to encourage raids on node operators, but it is worthwhile to keep in mind that there could be actual reasoning behind these actions.
If you are smart about this, you can even get the relevant and obtainable info with little LE resources and without unduly harassing the operator.
I am sorry for what your governments are about to do you, bc you will likely go through a very difficult time in the near future. Now, its Tor and Telegram - soon, every opinion you have shared will likely be scrutinized and used against you.
Good luck, European people. I am hoping the best for you.
It won't be a continent that will be regarded as a bastion of civil liberties in the future with their current course.
Ironically, through that they also make everything less safe.
Mad respect to anybody who goes against the grain, and puts their own livelihood and freedom at risk, to help support privacy and freedom.
It wouldn't fix the "someone used my exit node to send a bomb treat" case though.
The tech is probably impossible, but I'm not seeing a moral case against it.
There's many cases where ISPs are ordered to block piracy and streaming sites that are in another country.
Likely run by Russian intelligence services or their catspaws and therefore heavily monitored and logged.
US intelligence likely run their own tor nodes as well.
This was 2017 however and I'm surprised too that crackdown on other exit nodes didn't follow.
They just have a Russian ASN and IP space but it's still located in Norway.
But that requires the (likely non-trivial) expense of a business premises for likely the sole purpose of running exit nodes.
It's only the stupid and poor that can be held to account.
No. Their objective is to intimidate individuals, exhaust them, which leads to...
> As a consequence, I am personally no longer willing to provide my personal address&office-space as registered address for our non-profit/NGO as long as we risk more raids by running exit nodes. That is a risk I am just no longer willing to take anymore.
Which is totally understandable.
Even like, the majority or minority.
On the other hand Germany does use flimsy excuses to crack down on services like Tor and that's bad.