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Comment by iamtherockstar | Hacker News Reader

If you go to a bank, rob it, and then walk outside to a waiting taxi, and have the taxi drive you home, is the taxi driver an accessory? I think that in the US you'd really have to make a case that the taxi drive had knowledge of what had transpired.

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If you go to a bank, rob it, and then hand the money to your friend for hiding, then your friend is an accessory. (Possession of Stolen Goods at the least)

Did he rob the bank? No. He may have just been at home, not involved in planning at all, you show up with $50,000, ask him to hide it and tell him it's stolen.

He was just used to transfer the goods, but he's still breaking the law.

Likewise laundering the stolen money is illegal, even though you didn't steal it.

Your scenarios are about knowingly transferring illegal goods. The Tor operator didn't know that illegal data was being transferred over his equipment. In the same way a webhoster isn't liable for the data his clients are hosting.

The thing is, if you're operating a TOR node you should have full knowledge that people are going to use it as much for illegitimate uses as much as legitimate uses.

And if you're operating a cab, you should have full knowledge that people are going to use it as much for illegitimate uses as much as legitimate uses.

Your point being?

For Tor, the ratio of legitimate to illegitimate is perhaps 1:1, whereas for taxis it's like 1000:1, or higher. At least that's how I read "as much as".

Sources for those ratios please.

I did use the words "perhaps" and "like", and the definition of "as much as", to me, is 1:1.

Even a ballpark estimate makes no sense without at least a vague source. You're trying to define statistics for a network that is designed to make it infeasible to gather statistics...

Alright, I wasn't being clear.

My real objection was groby_b stating something that is almost certainly incorrect (taxi ratio is 1:1) - I would bet money on this - as a means to refute something that is perhaps incorrect / unknowable (Tor ratio is 1:1).

I have no idea what the Tor ratio is, but it is "perhaps" 1:1. And what does legitimate mean anyway? Some of the work on Tor is funded by the US government so that people in oppressive states can speak out, which means that in those countries that speech is "illegitimate" whereas in the US it is not. Or did we mean morally illegitimate? Whose morals are we talking about? Or did mean we mean child pornography? And is that still illegitimate in all of the nation states that repress speech?

I think my ballpark estimate for taxis is reasonable, and that if motivated you could certainly find a lower bound on that ratio from taxi rides per capita per annum, crimes per capita per annum, and the assumption that all crimes used a taxi driver as an accessory.

If you had written your response here to swalsh, who defined a statistic of 1:1 for Tor, I wouldn't have anything to post.

Also your factual statistics compared to your made up statistics is perhaps 1:1,000,000,000. I can think of about 10 people I personally know that use Tor (off the top of my head). 10 of those people use it legally. So 0 in 10 people sure it for legitimate purposes. Therefore, 0 in 1,000,000,000 actually use it for legitimate purposes.

You don't know that for certain. There can be a taxi which is exclusively used by mafia ->therefore(following your argument) all taxis should be banned.

The nature of Tor is such that you'll never, right? I suppose you could keep logs and analyze them, but that kind of defeats the purpose.

Possibly that the exit node is NOT his means of subsistence and the legal status of taxi driving/Internet Provider.

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