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German TOR Servers Seized
mrogers writes "Servers participating in the TOR anonymizing network have been seized by public prosecutors during a child porn crackdown in Germany. TOR provides anonymity for clients and servers by redirecting traffic through a network of volunteer-operated relays; the German prosecutors may have been trying to locate an anonymous server by examining the logs of the captured relays."
They were siezed as evidence. The prosecutors monitored a forum where childporn was traded and basically siezed every computer whoose IP was in the logs. There is some controversity on this siezure, as there are rumors that the prosecutors knew that they won't find anything on a tor-node. It is important to note that none of the tor-nodes-owners has been charged with anything; running tor on a server is NOT the reason these people were targetted.
For all intents and purposes it looks like "harrassing" is the answer. There are several articles about this (See http://www.boingboing.net/2006/09/10/report_german _police.html for a nice round up of them) which clearly indicate that the authorities were both aware of how TOR operates and aware that any data gleaned from the TOR servers would likely be uselss. The good news is that the owners of said servers are (currently at least) treated as witnesses and not suspects; the bad news is that all raided nodes were exit nodes and that at least in one instances the hard drive was wiped during the investigation before being returned. Arguably, they might want to ensure that the owners of the TOR servers did not somehow try to mask their own access to kiddie porn through it, but in all it looks like heavy handed harassment.
The crime is posession. I know a case where police raided several homes because one picture of a cdrom full of porn pictures which you could order via internet was child porn. Most people didn't even notice it (several thousand pictures on one cd) but still got prosecuted for posessing child porn.
Shame on them, investigating computers used to access child pornography.
Note that, due to the way Tor works, seizing the Tor exit nodes won't help track down the actual people responsible in any way. (Even if they had full access logs, which I somehow doubt, all each node knows is the previous step in the routing chain, not where the connection originated). It will, however, help scare people off running Tor nodes quite nicely.
I ran an anonymous service for 5 years providing anonymous browsing and anonymous e-mail. Looking at this article and calming that it is being abused and should be shut down (As one person has done) is nuts! When I ran my server I maintained a count on the number of transactions. This is the number of anonymous e-mails and the number of anonymous http connections. We averaged 500,000 e-mails a day (15,000,000 per month) and over 25,000,000 http tractions per month. This generated an average of 324 emails to abuse/complaints per month. Less than 10% of the complaints were abuses of the system. I would not considered the posting of KKK material to the alt.white.power group an abuse of the system but it would generate complaints. I may not agree with there views but they have a right to them.
What you are seeing is one abuse of the system. This abuse is not put into prospective. If it were we would have an idea of the amount of traffic the Tor network handles and compare that to the number of abuses we see. We can not condom the network or servers based on a soul abuse of the system!
Recently the president condemned Anonymous E-mail and pay as you go Cell phones and announced that we need to pass laws to stop it. This is just wrong! It is like saying that be for you can publish anything, you must ID your self. This is against everything that the founding Fathers stood for! The Federalist papers are a great example of that!
The Federalist Papers were a series of articles written under
the pen name of Publius by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison,
and John Jay. Madison, widely recognized as the Father of
the Constitution, would later go on to become President of
the United States. Jay would become the first Chief Justice
of the US Supreme Court. Hamilton would serve in the Cabinet
and become a major force in setting economic policy for the US.
Our founding Fathers hid there identity behind a pen name! So next time you condemn anonymity, remember that it is the way to have unwanted political views heard with out being persecuted for your ideas.