I run a node as well and noticed other (far less severe) downsides of doing so. Registering on certain forums won't work and purchasing games on Steam doesn't work. These parties just blacklist the entire list of IPs published running exit nodes.
I know that people like to pretend otherwise, but as long as there are crossover points between the Tor network and the public internet, there will be non-anonymous people in the real world who will have to deal with things like this. "I'm running a Tor exit node" is not (and should not be) a magical pass that makes you immune to any kind of investigation.
But, if he is found guilty and the traffic did come from tor than this is a lot like sending drugs through the mail and convicting the post office.
Most of us would probably agree that convicting the post office would be crazy, yet there's an entire continuum of package delivery services including the government postal system, private delivery services like UPS, professional couriers and asking your friend Steve to drop something off on his way home from work. If Steve gets caught delivering a package that contains drugs, his claim of being an unknowing "relayer" would likely be viewed with more suspicion than the same claim coming from a UPS truck driver.
That reasoning makes sense to us because we know how package delivery systems work, and have a vague idea of the probabilities involved. However, Tor is new and niche enough that you can't rely on an arbitrary person (or even a police officer or judge) knowing enough about it to make those same judgments. They don't know whether Tor is more like Steve or the postal service, and it'll take time before that knowledge is assimilated.
http://torrentfreak.com/anonymous-file-sharing-ruled-illegal...
The laws need to be changed so that you're not responsible for someone routing something through your PC if you're not aware of what is being routed, and it should be done at the EU level. I hope at least the Pirate Party starts working on pushing for this law.
I think the authorities know exactly what they doing: they don't want people to anonymously surf the internet, so the prevent it by making it impossible to run Tor nodes or Wifi networks. I don't like it...
BTW plenty of IRC-based botnets already do something similar, though usually without proper encryption.
If it weren't "think of the children", it would be "al Qaeda was organizing anonymously". They need a reason to create a hostile climate for privacy and anonymity.
If every tor exit node vanished today, tor's darknet half will thrive and the network would still be valuable. It's trivial to set up a hidden service. If you want to whistle-blow to the media, you'd set up a http or ftp share and drop the .onion URL in the mail to your journalists of choice.