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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.
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.
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).