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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."
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).
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.
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.
"On what legal basis?"
Actually, under the auspices of the Because Act, this is entirely legal. This little known piece of international legislation is, in fact, at the heart of many of the most prominent legal actions in the world today. Much loved by the RIAA, MPAA and the US due to it's implicit allowal for random search and seizure, legal 'fishing trips', non-judicially warranted wire taps, and it's espousal of 'guilty until proven guilty' legislature; the entire text of the Because Act has been reproduced below: -
Because Act
1. Because.
1.1. Just, because.
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.
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.
Well said, Jeff.
qntm.org
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.
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.
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.
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.
let me answer for the police for you.
this is a very accurate answer....
NO.
well maybe, a friend got their PC back after 4 years and the drives were wiped. If the police take it, do not ever expect it back.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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.
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...
The truth is there is not guarantee to anonymity in the US constitution out side of voting. I doubt that Germany or the rest of EU is any different. What people don't seem to get is that Child pornography isn't a victimless crime and it is a bigger problem that most people want to admit. Child pornography looks like it will be the down fall of the all anonymous Internet access.
I was going to rant about how TOR and Freenet should do some self policing and frankly I wish that they would. However I can also see how that could remove any type of common carrier status protection they may have.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Tibet, anyone?
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
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.
When I read words like these, I have to wonder if there is a purpose to such self-righteous posturing, or whether the poster expect everyone to share that leap of faith and assume it's relevant to the article or subject.
Hate to disturb any heads that might have been nodding in unison, but what the hell. A reasonable estimate is that 99.99% of the crap that would/could be found is the same crap that's been shovelled and re-shovelled through usenet as far back as I remember. Have a look some time. The only real crime to be found (with rare exceptions) is the crime you would commit by looking (i.e., downloading) and that crime, as far as I'm concerned, is a very technical one. As for everything else -- provocative, lewd, in bad taste, shameful -- I can think of lots of words, but an organised police hunt to track down a bunch of wankers downloading pictures protects no one and is a misplaced effort at best. If you're looking for likely targets of people who do, in fact, commit real crimes against children, you might start by looking at families -- aunts, uncles and close relatives. Those folks rarely take pictures, however, let alone publish evidence of their crimes for everyone on the the internet to share.
I'm reminded of something I heard not too long ago on a show hosted by that emotional snow-job of a wanna-be-anchor by the name of Anderson Cooper. He was speaking with some law enforcement officer who informed him with requisite officiousness that there were "over 100,000 child pornography sites" on the internet. Shit, you'd think with that many we'd all be tripping over them every day! But we don't. Go figure. The veteran reporter's reply was "Gee, I didn't know that."
Journalism at it's finest.
What does exists, to varying degrees, is the content from a bunch o teen modelling sites (many in the US) and a few websites here and there that are most likely run by Russian mafia that belong in the provocative, lewd, or in bad taste category (depending on one's jurisdiction, religeous affiliation and/or degree of interest in prurient matter). Criminals? Most likely, at least the Russian ones. But no monsters.
"The last thing I want to do is deal with a bunch of people who want something."
Major Major
It's perfectly logical. "i" before "e" except after "c" or when sounded like "a" as in "neighbor" or "weigh" unless it's the "cies" in the plural of a word ending in "cy", a gerund like "being", a word starting in "i" prefixed with "re", or one of these exceptions: albeit ancient atheist caffeine casein cleidoic codeine conscience counterfeit deficient deity efficient eider either feisty financier foreign forfeit glacier gneiss greige greisen heifer heigh-ho height heir heist kaleidoscope keister leisure leitmotiv monteith neither omniscient onomatopoeia peignoir phenolphthalein phthalein prescient proficient protein reveille Rotweiller science seismic seize seizin sheila society sovereign specie species sufficient surfeit teiid their weir or weird. That about covers it.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.