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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."
Axis of evil, 9/11, terrorists, paedophiles, pirates, political opposition. That should cover it.
Child porn. Apparently, the IPs of some of those servers were found on the logs of child porn web sites.
The excuse to seize the servers relies on the cops wanting to find any data of those web site users, which they won't, because of the way Tor is built.
Sad day for annonymous Internet, as more of the crap side of humanity uses services like Tor, and people who do need it, like people in China, are the ones burned.
I wonder how the law is worded in Germany - is the crime posession (in which case stray banner ads in your browser cache would be just as criminal), or is the crime the intentional act? The catch is that if the crime is over intentional act, then that law is a thought crime law, which is also bad - though it does protect against automatic guilt for detection.
Sexual crimes against children are some of the most monsterous things mankind can do - and they do occur with a very high frequency, and they are worth detecting and stopped at every opportunity. But like most conceptual wars on horrible things, it collateral damage can go out of control when unchecked. Here's hoping that this guy is innocent, and that his case can at least set some boundries on law are acceptable in this horrible issue.
Ryan Fenton
Of course, comrade. If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
How long would they be gone? Would I ever get them back? Can they at least clone the disks for me so I can have my data back?
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
So if you aren't trading child porn, you are fine. Are you worried?
But the people who had their equipment seized WEREN'T trading child porn (or at least, they've not been arrested or charged with that). They were just running a Tor node, which is perfectly legal, and something I do. So yes, I am worried.
I walk in my room to find my computer was stolen
Me: OMG My computer was stolen
My Friend: If there was no child porn on it you are ok
Me: What the fuck are you talking about? My COMPUTER IS GONE
running tor on a server is NOT the reason these people were targetted.
I disagree. Running TOR is exactly the reason they were targeted. There may be nothing illegal about running TOR, but there is no denying the chilling effect of the government seizing people's computers on the kiddie porn pretext. The fewer people running TOR, the fewer people who can freely criticize governments--any governments, not just those in China.
Sad day for annonymous Internet, as more of the crap side of humanity uses services like Tor, and people who do need it, like people in China, are the ones burned.
Did it ever occur to anyone that protecting governments--all governments, not just those in China--from opposition is the very reason for taking actions like this?
Think about it: do kiddie porn and terrorism really affect more people in the world than say, domestic violence, or alcohol abuse, or even theft? Do kiddie porn and terrorism affect more people than lack of food, lack of sanitary water, low wages, or disease? Do kiddie porn and terrorism affect more people than hurricanes and tsunamis? Do kiddie porn and terrorism affect more people than war, cluster bombs, or unexploded mines?
Ah, but where are government resources spent: fighting the scourge of kiddie porn and the battling terrorists lurking under every bed.
The point of these "fights" against kiddie porn and terrorism are to get people accustomed to giving up their rights and, sure enough, even in the U.S. our rights are rapidly being eroded. A supreme Court Justice from even 30 years ago would hardly recognize the U.S. today.
Yet.
Ignore this signature. By order.
Is taking nude photos of a girl who is 17 years and 11 months old some of the most monsterous (sic) things mankind can do? According to Albert Gonzalez it is. Is it monstrous to take nude photos of a woman made up to look like a young girl? Maybe your age limit should be 21 years to be sure.
The current withchunt on pedophiles fails to make a distinction between act against a 5 year old, and those of a seventeen year old. A Seventeen year old can be accepted in the army and carry a gun, but is not mature enough to make decisions about their own bodies. Makes sense to me...
Tibet, anyone?
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Your reasoning would make phone companies and ISPs equally culpable. I agree with you, but I'm just not sure you thought it through.
"The last thing I want to do is deal with a bunch of people who want something."
Major Major
Any particular reason that you think browsing disturbing images should be a crime? I agree, it'd make you a sick whacko, but since when did we decide to lock up all sick whackos even if they didn't actually do anything? I think I must have missed something while I was on safari in Iran...
I hate printers.
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
It is a classic "Four Horse Men" manuever:
If Tor users include Kiddie Porn, then Tor must be bad and eliminated. Especially if it interferes with policework. So start associating the two and eventually people will be happy to make other people give up their rights.
My Suburban burns less gasoline than your Prius.
Once they notice that they cannot gain any info from the servers, they will be returned.
HAAAAAAAAHAHAHAH! That's hilarious.
5 years from now, once the machines are basically worthless, they'll be "returned" with severe damage and missing hard drive.
The theory is (you're talking about child porn right?) that the consumers of it create demand. Going after them reduces demand and helps keep this from happening to kids. I don't know if it works or not, but if it does it's certainly an appropriate strategy IMO.
A machine connects to a child porn website. The website server records its IP address. The police obtain the server's logs, locate the suspicious machine and are informed by its owner that it's a Tor node.
Should the police:
If it is a 100% legitimate Tor node, then the police won't find anything untoward. But the police still have to check - because otherwise, "I was running a Tor node, honest guv'nor!" could become a standard get-out-of-custody-free card for anyone else whose computer is under investigation.
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
Do you mail your letters in clear envelopes?
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
But when the time comes that people are getting "disappeared" for criticizing the government, I'd rather that TOR existed than not. If we let TOR get disassembled now because of "think of the children" issues, we'll be screwed in the future when we really need it.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
"The congress shall pass no law restricting the freedom of speech."
1st Amendment to the US Constitution. Anonymity is a prerequisite for truly free speech, and any judge who rules otherwise should be shot. The founders themselves published under pseudonyms in order to protect their identities while still spreading the word about their new government, for two reasons:
1. Anonymous writers do not have to deal with ad hominem attacks, meaning nobody can try to kill the message by attacking the messenger, and
2. People saying unpopular things tend to become the focus of alot of violence very quickly, and anonymous speech protects their lives.
The founders recognized that ideas are more important than stability and should be kept safe from force. THAT is the value in anonymity and that was one of the intentions behind the 1st Amendment.
Anyone who has read the Federalist Papers (or even a good review of them) would know that, and that damn well includes ANY judge ruling on ANY topic that might even HINT at a Constitutional issue.
We are the fire that lights our world.. and we are the fire that consumes it.
There are two views about "bad" information:
AFAIK, every government in the world, presumably in accordance with the will of the people, has laws that suggest their policy is based on the first view.
They differ in how they stress the details. Some might be more concerned with kiddie porn, some more concerned with copyright infringement, maybe some(?) are concerned about nuclear bomb plans or other classified information. Whatever. I haven't heard of any government that completely and absolutely protects all free speech (though counter-examples are welcome).
So let's think about what policies should exist, if we postulate that the first view (some kinds of information is "bad") represents "our" opinion. (If you disagree with this view, then you're going to hate the policy below.) Law Enforcement, civil lawyers, etc, are going to want some way to hold someone responsible when "bad" information gets spread.
The simplest approach is for The Man to get on the net and search for "bad" information and find someone to serve it to Him, and then go after whoever served it. Then either they get held responsible, or else they show how they're just a middleman and they point to who sent it to them. If they can't pass the buck, then the buck stops with them.
In the case of these pseudo-anonymous virtual networks, that means that if your TOR node passes packets containing kiddie porn (or copyrighted materials, or nuclear bomb plans, or an opinion piece about how the Nazi party should return to power in Germany) to an investigator and they come after you, then you are responsible for what your computer, acting as your agent, did. You're not a common carrier, unless you can show you were just a router and you can identify who sent you the packet so the investigator can continue to trace it back to the source.
So that's why TOR either needs to log, or else TOR operators need to deal with the fact that sometimes The Man is going to attack them. Are you going to pass the buck, or are you going to take responsibility?
What if you hold the second view, that information can't be bad and therefore no one ever has the right to try to prevent its spread? Well, you're in trouble. You live inside a legal environment that, frankly, does not agree with you. You can try to change that, but you're going to have an uphill battle against reality. So I recommend you lobby hard. If you're going to operate a TOR node prior to the lobbying completing its goal, be ready for when they take your computer and possibly press charges against you. Running a TOR node is dangerous and pisses off people who are more powerful than you, and it appears that the majority of people support the idea of this power being used against you. You understand what you're up against, right?
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
or 3, check the IP address out and find out if it connects to a TOR server. It would seem that this should be possible without seizing the computer.
... But the machine could potentially be both a Tor node and be responsible for accessing the child porn website - without the aid of some separate, anonymous request routed over Tor. One hypothetical case would be a desktop machine that also runs a Tor node in the background. Without a close look at the machine, the police have no sensible way of telling.
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?