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).
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.