Slashdot Mirror
German Police Arrest Admin of Tor Anonymity Server
An anonymous reader writes "In a recent blog posting, a German operator of a Tor anonymous proxy server revealed that he was arrested by German police officers at the end of July. Showing up at his house at midnight on a Sunday night, police cuffed and arrested him in front of his wife and seized his equipment. In a display of both bitter irony and incompetence, the police did not take or shut-down the Tor server responsible for the traffic they were interested in, which was located in a data center, over 500km away. In the last year, Germany has passed a draconian new anti-security research law and raided seven different data centers to seize Tor servers. While back in 2003, A German court ordered the developers of a different anonymity network to build a back-door into their system."
Germany is soon becoming a screwed up democracy like the USA. I wonder how far this will go until western rooted terrorism comes on par with middle eastern terrorism. If the western governments continue to assault their people like this, terrorism will only grow in scope and severity. Their war on terror will obviously only generate more of what they are fighting. Too bad the politicians slept in class.
Do they not realize that the vast majority of people who use that software do not live under their laws and thus make the law utterly useless either way? of course they do, it isn't about actually solving problems, it's about looking like your trying to solve problems. it works in every country.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
Too true. There comes a time when a government turns on the very people it was designed to nurture, and the results can be disasterous.
Does anyone recall the French Revolution?
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
We can now easily predict that the German government will soon find it difficult to hire people with an admitted knowledge of computer security topics. If you were German, would you admit to such knowledge to an official questioner?
;-)
Sorta like how the US government has been complaining about the difficulty of hiring Arabic translators, despite the statistics from a few years back saying that there were several million US residence who were fluent in Arabic. (And, contrary to the jokes going around, they aren't all gay.
It's commonly known as "shooting yourself in the foot".
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
The US Navy uses Tor to talk to intelligence sources. Chinese dissidents use it to send uncensored news to the west. And criminals can just use botnets. Criminals already have anonymity, it's the rest of us that Tor is designed for.
Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further development.-- Frontinus, 1st cent. AD
for example, "Teledienstgesetz" (translate this as: Telecommunications Act) says TDG 9
(1) Diensteanbieter sind für fremde Informationen, die sie in einem Kommunikationsnetz übermitteln oder zu denen sie den Zugang zur Nutzung vermitteln, nicht verantwortlich, sofern sie
1. die Übermittlung nicht veranlasst,
2. den Adressaten der übermittelten Informationen nicht ausgewählt und
3. die übermittelten Informationen nicht ausgewählt oder verändert haben. which boils down to to: telecommunications providers arent liable for other ppls information, if they
1. didn't initiate the connection,
2. didn't choose the recipients and
3. didn't choose or change the information.
However wrote that securty "law" sould be fired and never allowed to write anything close to a rules or laws. This laws are ofcourse only going to make Germany the favorite spot for virus makers, since securtie flaws dont get fixed.
Happy new computer virus infected Germany!
(Or rather, to hell with it.)
I propose to suspend Godwin's law for this article, ...
;-)
Heh; good suggestion.
In high school, I took a couple years of German from a teacher who was born here in the US, of German immigrant parents. She taught us a lot of German proverbs, and one of the first (also the title of a well-known folk song) was "die Gedanken sind frei", or "[my/our] Thoughts are Free". Her point was that the sort of repression recently imposed by the Nazis wasn't at all an aberration in German-speaking society; it was really just an extreme case of something with a long history in that society and many others. The proverb (and song) long predate the Nazis, and make the point that the authorities may be able to punish you for what you do or say, but they can't control your thoughts. She commented that she had often heard older Germans (in Germany and the US) muttering this phrase or quietly humming the final line of the song when some political big-wig said or did something that threatened citizens freedoms. She made it clear that this was often as appropriate in the US as in other countries.
It was sorta fun being taught such quiet resistance in German. Some of us did understand that, contrary to all the propaganda telling us how free we were, her job could well be in danger if certain people in the local government understood what she was teaching her students.
(Another lesson explained why that "die" in the proverb isn't best translated literally to English as "the", and why a pronoun is a better translation in such cases. It's a subtlety that the above wikipedia page gets wrong. It's sorta like why, when Kennedy declared "Ich bin ein Berliner", he was actually telling the audience that he was a jelly-filled doughnut.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
First they came for the Jews and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew. Then they came for the Communists and I did not speak out because I was not a Communist. Then they came for the trade unionists and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak out for me. -- Pastor Martin Niemöller
Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest. --Denis Diderot
The actual quote, which you failed to attribute, is by Benjamin Franklin and reads:
Note the adjectives "essential" and "temporary". To earn the "Insightful" moderations, which the clueless mods have given you already anyway, you must demonstrate, that the given-up liberty is essential, and that the gained security is only temporary.
Can you? I don't think so...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Simply because a few people abuse a fredom does not justify outlawing it.
That's like the idiots that don't want stores to sell crowbars because some burglers use them to break into houses. Common sense here says my right to buy a crowbar without obtaining a permit from the government is not a fredom that should be revoked simply because some people abuse it. If you don't like them using a crowbar to pry open your front door, find another way to deal with them. Don't revoke a right from me.
This is just a government's typical reaction to a situation where something is happening that they don't like, and they can't come up with an effective yet reasonable way to stop it, so they take draconian measures to make it stop, regardless of the fredoms that get trampled upon. Most of the rights abuses we see nowadays can be tracked back to this thought process.
Laws like this follow closely with "the end justifies the means" line of thinking. The end (alone) never justifies the means. If every reason you have for passing a law can be reduced to that one pilar, you are making a bad law.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Let's keep this in perspective, this is both stupid and unacceptable but Germany is still the first country of Privacy International's Privacy index. Germany and Canada are the only countries in the world whose legislations are considered to have "Significant protections and safeguards"
The United States and the UK are respectively categorized as "Extensive surveillance societies" and "Endemic surveillance societies".
This account differs so substantially from the standard version that I am going to have to ask you to provide your source.
(Not because I think you're making stuff up - I have no doubt that the standard version of the story is very inaccurate, as most founding-legends tend to be - but because I'd like to read further about the modern understanding of events!)
(The other 20% are either car analogies or people citing statistics they just made up.)
I have a problem with Privacy International's Index. How credible is it when the UK and China are both described as "endemic surveillance societies"? Hello: one is a democracy, the other a totalitarian state where people get jailed for their beliefs and voicing their political opinions too openly. Is there a "great Hadrian Firewall" in England? I don't think so.
The major flaw in their study is that they seem to focus on one very limited aspect of "privacy", i.e. wiretapping,etc. What they should also take into account is whether there are clear rules governing admissibility of those materials in court. After all, if the government can listen to what you say or watch what you do but cannot use it in court, why should you be too worried?
And don't forget that most European countries are now restricting freedom of speech in unacceptable ways. Take a look at this EU directive: http://www.europarl.europa.eu/oeil/file.jsp?id=216962. Someone who criticizes Islam, Christianity, Judaism or any other religion might be charged under this statute, since it might be argued that he is inciting hatred against members of this religion.
All in all, I think the US is still 'freer' than most countries in Europe: can you be a holocaust denier in Europe? Can you reveal a politician's dirty secrets without being charged for slander or libel (in many European countries, if it is a 'private matter', you're not even allowed to prove in court that what you wrote or said is true).
Look, every single person in the world believes their taxes are unreasonably high. This is rarely true. Wikipedia provides an interesting chart, which shows Sweden as having high personal taxes (but somewhat lower than France, Germany, and Belgium), and pretty reasonable corporate taxes (where the supposedly more capitalist USA has among the highest listed). God only knows if the chart is accurate or meaningful, of course, given the source.
The most realistic alternative is to call the news media (or anyone you know who has a video camera).
It's not really the taxes which I dislike, I'm a student ;) It's more the general moral amongst the citizens, and the way of thinking. The country is way too neutral, we bend too much according to what other countries (and EU of course) says, and it's reflected amongst the population. Few people stand up for what they think, and if you do you'll be labeled a proud idiot. We even have a name for the phenomenon - "Jantelagen". You're not allowed to be proud of yourself, and you're not allowed to think outside the political box. To be honest, I'm sick and tired of it.
I guess some people think Sweden is cool because of the pirate bay and how it's pretty much "ok" to download copyrighted material and such. But my guess is that we'll be just as the states within a couple of years.
Hey! That's my sig you're smoking there!
it's considered suspicious when someone refuses to answer the door to the police. if they know you are there, they will bust down the door and drag you down to the station and eventually release you a few hours later. There is nothing you can do to stop them because in that scenario nobody is going to be on your side.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire