Slashdot Mirror
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."
On what legal basis?
0 693
---
http://world4.monstersgame.co.uk/?ac=vid&vid=4701
http://ebgp.net/ccc/
Just another fine example of why logging your customer activity can be a bad thing.
As far as I know and read the Tor documentation, Tor doesn't keep logs. So either the police is incompetent, doesn't know it and seizes the servers anyway (not unsurprising), or either they are irritated by an anonymous network they can't control and try to harrass as many people using it as they can, to try to break it down (also wouldn't surprise me). Or both options apply at the same time (most probable option IMO).
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
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
Not interesting
As far as I know and read the Tor documentation, Tor doesn't keep logs.
Read first, then post.
By default, Tor logs to the screen (it's called "standard out", or "stdout" for short) at log-level notice. However, some Tor packages (notably the ones for OS X, Debian, Red Hat, etc) change the default logging so it logs to a file, and then Tor runs in the background.
Not your life, maybe.
So one would have to deliberately change several defaults to get logs with any data the cops might be interested in. From their point of view, worth a try, but unlikely to be fruitful.
1.2. I've answered why already twice, are you going to be making trouble?
Well said, Jeff.
qntm.org
``Only downside to using tor for IRC is that some idiots have gone and gotten some tor nodes glined (ie banned).''
That's kind of the problem I have with tor. In the absence of better identifying information, how else do you fight abuse than by throwing the baby (good tor users) out with the bathwater (abusers using tor)? The same applies to whole networks that operate from behind NAT or proxies, etc.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
The point here is that certain 'freedoms' have costs and limits. Your demand to avoid the petty rules of your school about IRC is merely a matter of degree away from a child pornographers demand to view kiddie porn unmolested.
And meanwhile, with the current international paranoia, the powers that be will always be very interested in who doesn't want to be listened to.
init 11 - for when you need that edge.
These governments want total control and will do whatever is necessary to get it - including subverting their own laws, false flag attacks, manipulation of the public via mainstream corporate media distortions etc.
BY the time their goals are achieved the internet will probably be like an interactive version of MSNBC crossed with the home shopping network.
Anonymity and privacy online will be a thing of the past. All dissenting viewpoints will be monitored; no, wait, ALL viewpoints will be monitored.
Things like TOR which promote freedom and privacy will not be tolerated by these fasicsts, and they will find a way to subvert or desrtoy them - if the child porn argument doesn't work then they'll use the oldest trick in the book: There are terra-ists out there, they're gonna get us! We must take away your freedom to keep you safe. Give it up for safety, trust us, we know what's best and we have your best interest in mind.
The rest of the unwashed masses are to be tagged and followed "for their own good" (according to the police).
If you listened to the police, they would jail everyone for their own good.
Why do anonymizers keep logs? A perfect anonymizer would keep no logs, be stateless, offer no sign of a transaction once closed. That probably wouldn't actually work, or be maintainable. But why not logs only to Flash, overwritten with random data after every transaction is completed? Transient encrypted logs useable only within the transaction, with the key deleted along with the rest of the log?
--
make install -not war
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."
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.
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.
submitted this at 1 am
BoingBoing picked up a report that German police has raided and seized TOR server rooms. TOR is a service that allows one to anonymize his or her internet experience (web, chat, etc). BoingBoing writes: “We need support, lots of people are chanting the same stupid arguments against anonymization over and over again... "You dont need to be afraid if you have nothing to hide" ... "Only criminals have the need for anonymity." [] AskMefi has a great list of responses to that infernal "if you have nothing to hide..." question.
soultcer.net : "According to an owner of one of the servers, who talked to a public prosecutor, the public prosecutors office knew that the server owners had nothing to do with the child pornography case. Regardless they confiscated some hard disks so that the TOR servers were unusable. As reason they stated that they wanted to scan for traces (e.g. log files). Even though TOR does not keep any logs? I dont really believe them...
Why have the hard disks really been confiscated??"
citizen428.net: :Don’t get me wrong, child pornography is one of the worst crimes I can think of, and I wish the German authorities all the best in finding the people they are after. I do however feel that the route taken here wasn’t ideal, as it may well lead to a negative perception of Tor in the general public."
itnomad: "One operator whose server was seized as well wrote a letter to all the TOR-operators in Germany he was aware of, reaching me as well; he wrote that he is not aware of any charges pressed against him at the moment and that his provider, whose server-room was raided, was not avilable for a real comment on the weekend."
Just because I don't care, it doesn't mean I don't understand. Homer J. Simpson
I suppose the difference is that:
1) Telcos let you get the CP.
2) TOR lets you get away with it.
ISPs don't anonymize your traffic and are complicit in government surveillance of it.
That said, I do most of my surfing through TOR just because I intrinsically hate the NSA spying on me. I use TOR for the sake of using TOR even though there are sites I can't go to anymore because of bans on TOR IPs thanks to bad actors. I've never liked people looking over my shoulder even when I'm doing absolutely nothing wrong. I'd rather be thought of as hiding something wrong than be known for sure to be doing nothing wrong just for the peace of mind of having my privacy.
The only things I don't do through TOR are things where I sign-in, like Slashdot, where anonymity is pointless and, in fact, running with an identity through TOR is possibly harmful since it makes it easier to identify each end of the TOR tunnel. It sure is slow-going, though.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
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.
Of course.
And that basic point empowers to do anything they want to anyone.
I'm sure that child pornography is so terrible, that you really would be okay to shoot them-- and by extension anyone who had anything to do with them.
And what is so fantastic about this is- you can SEND people these particularly illicit images and then bust them for having it on their computer if you time it right! Given just a few seconds of access to any computer- you can load it up with these illicit images and then bust people. Anyone that browses the web for illicit images has a fair chance of having some of these loaded on their computer without even realizing it.
---
Funny side note... I knew a person who caught her underage child were secretly sending naked pictures of themselves back and forth to their underage lover (who was returning the favor). So this teen hotty was adding a bunch of child porn to the net (and come on- when they break up, if the guy is pissed he is likely to post the pics somewhere adding them to the pool of naked humans that is the internet). And if caught, there is a very real chance that the parent could face huge fines, loss of the computer, or go to jail.
---
And your basic point is correct- a lot of law enforcement is about making the perp do the walk until they get tired or run out of resources. The law guy knows this person is involved with something but they can't prove it. Any TOR user accepts that they are allowing and supporting some bad things (illegal stuff, terrorism, etc.) so that other good things (privacy, oppose oppression?) can happen. For them, those good things are worth the trade off.
We dance on a fine edge- ready to teeter into totalitarianism and an endless boot on our faces.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Being an avid beer drinker myself I have to disagree with your "drinking can focus the mind" as alchohol prohibits brain activity on a biological level. And the other error "to take your mind off it for a few hours" is also equivalent to "escape". It is just as easy to go outside for a bit of fresh air, head out on a weekend trip, read a book, watch a movie, all are escapes. I challenge you to show how the drugs were not crippling our great thinkers. Rather than it being a vice they dealt with. As for history, it will point out several great thinkers who were destroyed by their drug abuse.
I have always found it interesting the way people strive to justify their addictions, it always seems justified in the eyes of the addict. Give there is a difference between addiction and casual drug use.
CS: It is all sink or swim...oh and did I mention there are sharks in that water?
And the other error "to take your mind off it for a few hours" is also equivalent to "escape"
Well, it's more equivalent to "step back and then return" in the sentence above; I was just saying they aren't always used that way.
I challenge you to show how the drugs were not crippling our great thinkers.
Well that's easy - did the Rolling Stones drug use cripple their music? Or Byron or Hunter S. Thompson? If people are "destroyed" they are destroyed by their own destructive personality, which was responsible not only for their destruction but for whatever their great works were - to separate the two and say the drugs were all bad and the cause of their destruction is to be in denial.
I have always found it interesting the way people strive to justify their addictions, it always seems justified in the eyes of the addict
Those who demonise drugs tend to believe they are justified, too.
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.
Tibet, anyone?
Yes, but is China overthrowing governments RIGHT NOW? Tibet was what, almost 50 years ago? Now I'm not saying China is perfect by any means, but would you draw the same comparison with the Japanese? Their behavior during WWII (similar amount of time ago) was completely atrocious, yet you didn't pick on them. Why? I wonder if it has to do with your personal biases about the particular styles of government these countries now use.
In contrast, the US invasion of Iraq is a current event, which is still ongoing. Your comparison is bogus.
We have people in key positions that don't even know, understand, or care about what is probably the most important document produced in our nation's history. For those interested:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6qX_BjzUJmg
Watch in earnest as General Michael Hayden revises the 4th Amendment.
I use Tor quite regularly and for a variety of reasons, none of them at all having to do with anonymity. The primary reason for running Tor is to avoid ISP man-in-the middle password phishing attacks while traveling in South East Asia (I started using Tor after having passwords stolen in this way while using my own laptop in a hotel in Manila). Tor encrypts traffic and bounces it around in Tor land until it bounces out, generally in Europe or the USA - and that brings me to the second reason for using it. Having my traffic coming from Europe or the USA while in South East Asia is beneficial.
It is your personal duty to fight for what is right on a daily basis. Ignoring injustice is identical to approving