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The EFF Reflects On ICE Seizing a Tor Exit Node
An anonymous reader writes "Marcia Hofmann, senior staff attorney at the EFF, gives more information on the first known seizure of equipment in the U.S. due to a warrant executed against a private individual running a Tor exit node. 'This spring, agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) executed a search warrant at the home of Nolan King and seized six computer hard drives in connection with a criminal investigation. The warrant was issued on the basis of an Internet Protocol (IP) address that traced back to an account connected to Mr. King's home, where he was operating a Tor exit relay.' The EFF was able to get Mr King's equipment returned, and Marcia points out that 'While we think it's important to let the public know about this unfortunate event, it doesn't change our belief that running a Tor exit relay is legal.' She also links to the EFF's Tor Legal FAQ. This brings up an interesting dichotomy in my mind, concerning protecting yourself from the Big digital Brother: Running an open Wi-Fi hotspot, or Tor exit node, would make you both more likely to be investigated, and less likely to be convicted, of any cyber crimes."
Immigration and Customs Enforcement. If you are downloading child pornography across US borders, it falls under the jurisdiction of ICE. Of course, harassing Tor exit node operators should not fall under the jurisdiction of any agency, but in Soviet America, harassing service operators who are not registered corporations is what we do.
Palm trees and 8
Right, that's why ISPs constantly have their routers and DNS servers seized, because so many people are using those computers for criminal activity.
Oh, wait -- ISPs are corporations, so we treat them differently. When it is some guy running a service out of his home, then the other set of rules applies, where the service operator is harassed by ICE and threatened when his equipment is returned.
Palm trees and 8
'Mere' investigation can be made rather unpleasant, depending on the crime in question, the enthusiasm of the cops running after it, and your access to legal representation...
There are the practical difficulties: Having everything vaguely resembling a computer siezed and held for who-knows-how-long, potentially quite signifcant legal costs, etc.
And there are the ones arising from the common, but troublesome, opinion that investigation is a sort of lesser degree of guilt. The taint by mere association is worst with kiddie-porn related matters; but the touchier types seem to consider "Police Record: Checked, found absolutely nothing." to simply be a subspecies of "Police Record" and act accordingly. Fan-tastic.
No, ICE (which was renamed during the reorganization of INS that took place under the Bush II administration, you partisan hack) stands for Immigrations and Customs Enforcement.
Sovereign states have the right to control what passes over their borders. It's part of the definition of statehood. Immigration is about who, Customs is about what.
Back on topic, EFF's "Tor is Legal" sounds an awful lot like the arguments made to justify Freenet back in the day. Ultimately, they all rely on notions like "in any sane legal system", or "in any free country". Problem is, by those sorts of definitions of "free" or "sane", the country hasn't been free since Patriot I, and its legal system has never been sane.
With the end of the Cold War and the demise of the USSR, we lost any motivation for claiming the moral high ground. From printers that identify their owners (like the Romanian archives of individual keystrokes from every manual typewriter), to widespread and omnipresent surveillance (decades before it became a meme, "In Soviet Russia, television watches YOU" was a joke about how much more free we were than the Russians), we ended up becoming what we fought against.
An employee at an ISP could download child pornography and disguise it as traffic from a customer. Why, then, does ICE not seize the ISP's equipment as part of their investigation, just to see whether or not that is the case?
The way you know that this has nothing to do with legitimate investigatory techniques is that ICE threatened the guy when they returned his equipment, telling him that he have to deal with more law enforcement harassment in future should he continue operating a Tor exit. This is a straightforward case of harassing the exit node operator because ICE was unable to defeat Tor. Aside from the minority of law enforcement officers who understand that law enforcement agencies benefit from Tor, law enforcement officers in general disdain Tor and think that it is a tool for criminals.
Palm trees and 8
Between letting a criminal get away and harming an innocent, I'd rather let the criminal get away, to be honest.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
every criminal could simply operate a Tor exit node and be out of reach of investigation.
Or they could just use Tor, and avoid being investigated in the first place. Which is what happened in this case.
The "every criminal will use this excuse" theory is baseless. If an IP address is the only evidence that someone committed a crime, then that person should not be convicted -- and we should be examining what sort of laws led to a situation where IP addresses are the only evidence needed for a search or arrest warrant. I share an Internet connection with several other people; should we all be arrested if the IP address happened to be an endpoint of illegal data? There are dozens of people who have SSH access to my research group's server, and it is possible that any of them could use that server as a proxy -- should the server and all of our computers be confiscated, and all of us arrested, if the IP address shows up during an investigation?
IP addresses are not a form of identification, and even less so when a Tor exit node has that IP address. Anyone could be a criminal, but we should have higher standards for evidence when it comes to issuing warrants and confiscating equipment.
Palm trees and 8
I run an exit node on a VPS. Apparently it'd been used by some guy to try to get a teenaged girl to send him naked pics. They subpoenaed everything back to my business cable connection at home and then called up my company (i.e. me) about it citing a scary amount of information about me. I explained to the detective what TOR was (I already have the standard exit node info page up as recommended on the web server), and he'd already heard it from someone else (a civil lib organization running TOR exits used by the same guy). They dropped it there. Scared me a little and I contacted the EFF, who did not hesitate to offer support should something worse happen in the future. EFF is one of the only organizations I donate to, ever, and I donate a decent chunk of change every month. I'm a proud supporter and it's good to know they're there to support me too.
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