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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."
should it be from the good guys never win dept.? or am i missing something about the almightiness or Tor?
People that trade freedom for security shall recieve neither.
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
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.
That puts the server in another country I guess. Anyhoo, it sounds like is time to escape Honecker and the Stasi and jump the wall... Uhh, what?
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
I propose to suspend Godwin's law for this article, because it will be really difficult to have a debate of any depth.
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
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.
> Come on, Eurotrolls, what do you have to say now?
Four words:
No Software Patents (yet).
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
Iraq? :{P
He was arrested. He will now go into extended negotiations with a prosecutor, during the entirety of which he will have a lawyer present. If the negotiations don't go favorably for him, he will have a fair trial. He will probably be convicted of it, which is an occupational hazard of doing things which the government has illegalized. After being convicted, he will be given a first-time-offender wrist-slap, probably a few months of probation and a stern warning not to do it again. Perhaps he will spend a few months of not-terribly-rigorous time in jail -- I'd bet against it but I'm not German. He'll lose quite a bit of money to attourney fees, less whatever the Tor community raises for his defense (I'm not optimistic), and probably have some equipment seized.
You know what doesn't happen?
He doesn't get summarily executed.
His wife doesn't get raped at gunpoint.
His child doesn't get burned in an oven.
People throw around the word fascist to describe any policy they don't like (that core observation is the heart of Godwin's law). Excepting the geographical accident that places both of them in Germany, there is NOTHING analagous between Nazism and the actions of the government in this case. If you want to convince people of the rightness of deploying a Tor network, keep a cool head and do not use any goose-stepping analogies, because they will brand you as a perspectiveless fanatic who is not to be taken seriously.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
"All you have to do is be fragile and grateful. So stay the underdog." Chuck Palahniuk, Choke
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.
But... but... doesn't he have any First Amendment rights?
[/merkin]
But to go to ha-ha-only-serious land, our laws seem to extend to other countries anyway. When it suits us.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Yup, the Nazis are very close to the surface in Germany. They are a real and continuous threat. Hitler actually won his elections...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
But I don't see any reasonableness in prosecuting an inherently reasonable law. Like that (black) high school student who had the book thrown at him for having sex with his (white) girlfriend because she was a couple years younger than him and broke an asinine law in Georgia.
People throw around the word fascist to describe any policy they don't like (that core observation is the heart of Godwin's law). Excepting the geographical accident that places both of them in Germany, there is NOTHING analagous between Nazism and the actions of the government in this case.
So what? Was Mussolini German?
yesterday when the powers that be introduced the logging act. All data connections, emails and phone calls has to be logged and kept on record for at least a year. Beat that!
Ahem, you really need to learn your history.
The "Dont Tread on Me" flag, aka the Gadsden flag, was a flag bourne in the American Revolution, not the Civil War. The Rattlesake, before the Bald Eagle, was the symbol of the United States itself.
How can we take your anti-semitic comments in any kind of serious manner when you do not even know the history of the very symbol of the American Revolution, no, the core values of the United States itself?
Bully I say, Bully!
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
the point is, that this is either
a) police stupidity
b) scare tactics
i'd safely bet on the latter.
People that trade old memes for karma shall receive neither.
People are making a big deal out of supposed incompetence of the German police in that they didn't even get the actual Tor server. Who cares? That's irrelevant. This is not about taking down a single Tor node. This is about sending a message ... run one of these and you are at risk, and when we decide to confiscate your property we're not going to be too careful about what we take. They probably figure that will be enough to keep a bunch of nerds in line.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
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.)
Congratulations! You were the first to Godwin the thread! Here are your lovely prizes...
Cool art gallery, if you're into that sort of thing.
> Hitler actually won his elections
Actually he manipulated and rigged the elections. Thank god that sort of thing never happens today...
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
Had it really been the Nazi's Gestapo, he would not be posting anything in September...
Zonk et al. really need to glue a nicely printed and framed quote of the Godwin's Law on their beds' footboards, to make it the first thing they see waking up...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
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.
Tor users should run Trusted Computers. This is a technology that lets remote observers check the software configuration of the system they are connecting to. Most people think it is only for DRM but actually it has many privacy-protecting uses. If a Tor system were a TC, remote Tor clients could check that the Tor server was not logging connections, running a version of Tor with a back door, or doing other things to infringe privacy. Then if you were asked by a court why you didn't add features to your Tor software to log users and such, you could explain that if you did so, remote clients would be able to tell (due to Trusted Computing features) and so they would refuse to connect to your system and refuse to use it. Likewise if you were ordered to run a backdoored version of Tor it would not be effective, because people could see what you were doing.
Ironically, Trusted Computing, hated by the larger Internet community, can actually play an important part in protecting privacy. It is unfortunate that uninformed opposition has slowed the adoption of this potentially very useful and helpful technology. I am working hard to advance Trusted Computing and I can't wait for the day when I can run transparent servers which remote clients will be able to validate and trust. Someday I expect that all Tor servers, anonymous remailers and other privacy protecting technologies will run on Trusted Computers.
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.
It would be different if this was just a hosting provider who provided service in good faith that someone took advantage of, this is someone running something INTENTIONALLY untrackable.
Built into that statement is the implicit assumption that law enforcement has an inherent right to track any Internet traffic back to its source, and that any intermediate service providers have the obligation to build their systems in such a way that this tracking is possible. Essentially you are saying that no one has the right to anonymous speech.
Like any technology, however, the anonymizing power of Tor can be used for both good or evil. It can be used by whistle-blowers to expose government corruption, and it can be used by pedophiles to distribute kiddy porn. It can be used by Chinese dissidents to criticize their government, and it can be used by terrorists to disseminate instructions on manufacture of explosive devices. So the question is, do we punish those who provide the technology because it can be used for evil? Evidently the German government has decided the answer is "yes". It's hard to argue for one side or the other because I think it comes down to personal values. I value free speech including anonymous speech, but I grew up in the American culture. Thomas Paine distributed his widely influential document Common Sense anonymously and it is possible the American Revolution would have ended differently had he not done so. One does wonder if highly oppressive regimes like the Nazis would have been able to hold power so long if the citizens had easy access to anonymous speech.
I think the value of services like Tor outweigh the disadvantages, so I do hope the German policy is not emulated by other countries.
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
You are just plain wrong. The phrase "Slippery Slope Fallacy" came from the phrase "Slippery Slope", not the other way around. The fallacy has to do with asserting that a Slippery Slope exists when in fact it does not. It has NOTHINNG to do with actual slippery slope situations, which can and do exist.
And I am inclined to agree that this is one of them.
Fascism doesn't appear instantly, it's usually a process. Having the Tor network made illegal seems to me, clearly, a part of that process. What we have here is yet another government requesting access to all their citizen's communications, and that is, IMHO, a surefire way to reach true fascism soon. Backdoors made mandatory? the police busting his door and arresting him at night for no serious offense? We should all be VERY afraid of this kind of behavior by our governments.
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".
But did ANY OF YOU read the frigging article ? Let me quote it for you with relevant part in bold.
The police were investigating a bomb threat posted to an online forum for German police officers. The police traced one of the objectionable posts on the forum to the ip address for Janssen's server. Up until his arrest, Alex Janssen's Tor server carried over 40GB of other random strangers' Internet traffic each day. 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 different city, over 500km away. Janssen's attempts to explain what Tor is to the police officers fell initially on deaf ears. After being interrogated for hours, someone from the city of Düsseldorf's equivalent of the Department of Homeland Security showed up and admitted to Janssen that they'd made a mistake. He was released shortly after.
Summary : somebody saw his server was the originator IP, somebody reacted quickly, a bit like the US homeland departement IMO could have done, and fell on the face because 1) they gathered the wrong PC 2) once the dust settled they recognized their error after being interrogated for horus. Not DAYS. Not MONTH. Hours. Sure it sucks but it was a bomb threat, in other word there was urgency, and they did not torture him, they did not water board him and pretend afterward it ain't torture. They interrogated him for hours and released him and admitted mistake.
And people here are taking comparison to loss of liberty and Nazi ? Hellllooo ? Knee jerk reaction ?
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
> So you're still free to steal the ideas of others.
Or we could allow silly patents like you do, patent roman and greek alphabets whose prior art are belong to us and watch americans resorting to cyrillic if they want to sell software here.
Oh wait, "PEAKTOP" is a cyrillic rendition, IIRC. You gotta go arabic, or chinese.
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
There is a tradition in many groups that, once this occurs, that thread is over, and whoever mentioned the Nazis has automatically lost whatever argument was in progress.
nazis are one of the biggest lessons that have happened to mankind. if some bunch of idiots can not realize that there are places that this example should be recalled, then its not worth to waste words with them.
Read radical news here
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.
....turn around, uh-oh
Der Kommissar's in town, uh-oh
And if he talks to you
And you don't know why
The more you live
The faster you will die
We have been through all of this Red Herring before and it won't make any difference. There is no point trying to understand how unimportant this discussion is if you don't understand today's Germany. Germany is the biggest exporting nation on Earth and it is the biggest player in the EU - which is the biggest market on Earth. Post war Germany actively chose the social democrat model for their economy and political system. It has the finest constitution in Europe (modelled on the US but containing substantially more pages!) the welfare state supports everyone and the growing economy provides the work that creates the wealth that pays for all this. It is normal for such a society to create a bunch of laws odd to English speakers - but then my own country doesn't even have a written constitution and our councils tax the individuals home. The present day German is focussed on career, personal improvement and health and very little else.
It is an unusual characteristic of Germany that everyone suffers from angst (fair enough, they invented the word) but the angst is all about really unlikely events (acrylimide in barbeque food causing cancer for example) and yet they throw caution to the winds the moment they get in a car.
This angst condition is so endemic I have christened it "Fright Club". Only a few weeks ago they were obsessed with "wifi smog" people were switching of their routers and phones to protect themselves from this new scourge. It didn't appear to stop them from watching television or listening to the radio, but there you go - science and magic confused or just interchangeable.
Coupled with this angst is another curious condition called Gründlichkeit or thoroughness. Gründlichkeit is just so much part of the German character. Back in Scotland you could read the important parts of the Blue Book tax guide in the bookshop and easily identify any new legal tax avoidance strategies. You couldn't do that with the German Tax Books because there are about 127 of them (the last time I tried to count them). My accountant just photocopies pages out and sticks them in the tax return. You have to pay canal tax but there's no canal and you don't get one either.
In Germany when you change your address, you have to inform the special municipal department -Wohnamtmeldegung- (department of names and addresses)of the change and fill in three forms. A group of students could not understand how this did not exist in Britain or USA. "What's to stop you getting on a plane, flying to the UK, robbing a bank and then flying home?" was their completely serious question and my answer: "Even German bank robbers don't normally use their identity cards or leave a forwarding address during the robbery," leaves them completely unconvinced.
Conversation with Wohnamt Official:
Official:"What is your father's occupation?"
"He's dead, what difference does it make?"
Official:"I have a space in the form for it"
"which job would you like?"
Official:"His last one..."
Official:"What religion are you?"
(proudly) "Agnostic"
Official:"You can have: Catholic, Protestant or atheist."
"But I'm an agnostic"
Official: Ticks 'atheist'
As for thoroughness, Non-German partners are often very surprised when they clean the entire house from top to bottom only to have their partner point out that they forgot the single cup they drank their post cleaning coffee in which is standing on the immaculate sink - dirty. There is no mention of all the good work, because the concept of balancing good things against negative things (one good thing outweighs loads of bad things) is rather specific to English speakers. German anthropology uses the concept of a linear measure of perfection (or distance from it!) and the streets are so clean you could eat your dinner off them. Well, almost but this is the real reason behind this action, more national character than conspiracy.
Germany has these laws and they pale into insignificance compared to the UK's
Posts, MyBio or Sig, may contain satire, sarcasm, bolded nouns be sardonic or even witty & be Church of SD
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!
I am writing from the USA. While it is possible with some digging to find out most of what legislation is being considered or passed in the state and federal level, there is the problem of many issues being bundled up in a single bill to be passed (earmarking http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earmarking) It is common practice here for Senators and Congressmen to hide special projects inside of larger bills. For example, there may be a bill up for vote that is titled "Education Reform Proposal #108" but the actual text of the bill is thousands of pages long. The first few hundred pages might actually have to do with education reform, but there will also likely be the funding for a bridge for one county, a tax break for a very specific company or industry, a regulation exemption for some other industry, and any other special things the politicians promised special interests that would be unable to pass as on their own merit. The result is that it is very difficult to know the entire contents of any bill to be voted on, and it is near impossible to have any bill make it as far as the voting stage without several earmarks being attached. So I do not know that I actually vote any better than my representative.
We are all just people.
At least in the letter I wrote, I pointed out that making security tools illegal would only stop the legitimate use of these tools and cause economic damage to the country by not allowing the good guys to mount an effective defense. Nefarious use of the tools wouldn't be stopped because they were conducting illegal activities anyway evectivley making the legislation counterproductive. I think it's because these terms were used, the magic "economic" word, and many other pragmatic arguments that legislators responded by rejecting the legislation.
I think Benjamin Franklin said it best when he said;
"We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately."
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
You do not seem to understand the basic concepts behind the words.
Security is always, ALWAYS, temporary. You CANNOT gain permanent security. EVER. Even if you locked yourself up in a fortress, protected by 10 battalions of heavily armed private militia, that is NOT permanent security. The circumstances of your security are ALWAYS temporary. The current government is temporary. World order is temporary. Your life is temporary. Franklin underlines temporary security, because it never lasts. EVER.
Similarly, an essential liberty refers to any liberty as essential. Liberties like freedom of speech, freedom of movement, right to your life, etc are all essential. There are no liberties that are non-essential. This is by definitions of what liberty means. You lose any part of that definition, and you lose more than you ever gain through some temporary security.
* autonomy: immunity from arbitrary exercise of authority: political independence
* freedom of choice; "liberty of opinion"; "liberty of worship"; "liberty--perfect liberty--to think or feel or do just as one pleases"; "at liberty to choose whatever occupation one wishes"
* personal freedom from servitude or confinement or oppression
http://www.google.ca/search?q=define%3A+liberty&hl=en
These are very general freedoms and we are losing them one chip of the security hammer at a time. Yet, we will NEVER get security because true security is a state of mind. Think about it - you are never physically secure in this world.
Example. People in UK allowed CCTV cameras to be put everywhere. They lost their liberty of freedom of movement (at least anonymous movement). They "gained" their security because they thought "it will fight crime". Result is that crime rate has not decreased. But the liberty will not be restored. Citizens of UK, and London especially, lost liberty and gained nothing.
I don't think the problem lies with Germans so much as it does (in varying degrees) throughout all people. Let's face it, people are a sucker for some well-delivered rhetoric. Thankfully, we've now passed Hitler, and we are more aware of what extremes Nationalism can get to, as well as the charisma of a person doesn't necessarily correspond with their leadership skills (or their sanity). I know some would argue that this is a sign that we haven't learnt from Nazi Germany, but I disagree. Any curtailing of rights != fascism. There's a long way between banning certain software tools and an isolated arrest and fascism like Nazi Germany had. I guess that's why we have (had?) Godwin's law.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
Ah Europe, progressive land of freedom
What does this got do with freedom? If someone turns you in telling the police that he received bomb threats from your IP address (which happened in this case), the only thing the police can do is investigate. And that inherently involves obtaining physical evidence, in this case seizing the computers as soon as possible before the suspect (yes, a potential criminal) destroys the evidence.
Now if there had been no freedom in Germany, the man would have not been released within a few hours with explanation he is innocent.
Name your source for it being an actual nuclear bomb. And the Islam thing. Schäuble said there is the danger of a dirty bomb but NOT an actual warhead. Nuclear warheads are no simple devices, they require skill to handle, otherwise it doesn't detonate, or it may even blow up while being armed etc.
As for the integration, while there are too many unintegrated ones, 100% is way too high a number.
This sig does not contain any SCO code.