> I'm not sure how a Tor exit node could operate legally. Tor is widely used for illegal activities.
How do ISPs operate legally? Every single thing that's ever been done over a Tor relay has crossed multiple ISPs.
How do ISPs operate legally? Every single thing that's ever been done over a Tor relay has crossed multiple ISPs.
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.
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?