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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.
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.
I do.. took us weeks to get it to revolve
> Come on, Eurotrolls, what do you have to say now?
Four words:
No Software Patents (yet).
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
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.
Does anyone recall the French Revolution?
Our leaders, both in the EU and the US, paid careful attention to the lessons learned in the French Revolution, namely that as long as you keep your people well fed and entertained, you can do whatever you damn well please. In the French Revolution, the people storming the Bastille had nothing to lose. But our level of comfort is carefully maintained to keep actual violent revolt from ever happening. Even the poor in our countries have too much to lose (thanks to government programs)to risk anything angrier than waving a slogan on a posterboard sign.
We are all just people.
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!
the point is, that this is either
a) police stupidity
b) scare tactics
i'd safely bet on the latter.
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.
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.
They only have the authority that YOU GIVE THEM. You can take that away just as easily. Turn your back on the government that you give authority to and they will go away. I have had the police knock on my door many times in a dispute with my neighbour, I never opened the door. Why? BECAUSE I DID NOT GIVE THE POLICE ANY AUTHORITY OVER ME to come in :) They have no power if I do not give it to them.
Easy. Now get your act together, government is made up of people. People only have power of you if you let them. Ignore them, they don't exist.
http://www.rense.com/general79/wdx1.htm
You are a brave man.
I gotta warn you, I know of localities where the cops break down doors. If that ever happens in your area, to your door, who are you gonna call? Or do you just plan to break out the ammo?
There is a fine line between recklessness and courage... -- Paul McCartney
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.
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
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
There is no such thing as a standard version of the french revolution. In fact, there is as many versions as political views.
What is clear is that the revolution was such a bloody event, with deep disorders, that the french people accepted democracy, half heartedly, only in 1870.
And France was the most powerful country (politicaly and economicaly) in Europe in 1789, and never was again after that.
About the bastille, it was a prison for priviledged people, and the prisoners were put again in prison shortly after being freed.
If you want a realistic view of the revolution, just read Chateaubriand (mémoires d'outre-tombe) or Hugo (1793).
The most realistic alternative is to call the news media (or anyone you know who has a video camera).
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
Are you perhaps thinking of the Bolshevik Revolution? On October 25, 1917, a women's battalion tried to defend the Winter Palace against the Red Guards. Upon the battalion's surrender, several of the women were reportedly raped and at least one committed suicide afterwards.
Huh? The Roman citizenry never revolted (Rome's various "civil wars" were fights between one rich patrician and another, not large-scale popular uprisings); Rome fell because it was invaded by foreign Gallic and Germanic tribes. All the bread and circuses did was weaken the Empire so that the barbarians had an easier time of it (and then again, they might have invaded regardless, since they were fleeing the Huns).
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.