Austrian Tor Exit Node Operator Found Guilty As an Accomplice

An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from TechDirt: Three years ago we wrote about how Austrian police had seized computers from someone running a Tor exit node. This kind of thing happens from time to time, but it appears that folks in Austria have taken it up a notch by... effectively now making it illegal to run a Tor exit node. According to the report, which was confirmed by the accused, the court found that running the node violated 12 of the Austrian penal code, which effectively says:"Not only the immediate perpetrator commits a criminal action, but also anyone who appoints someone to carry it out, or anyone who otherwise contributes to the completion of said criminal action." In other words, it's a form of accomplice liability for criminality. It's pretty standard to name criminal accomplices liable for "aiding and abetting" the activities of others, but it's a massive and incredibly dangerous stretch to argue that merely running a Tor exit node makes you an accomplice that "contributes to the completion" of a crime. Under this sort of thinking, Volkswagen would be liable if someone drove a VW as the getaway car in a bank robbery. It's a very, very broad interpretation of accomplice liability, in a situation where it clearly does not make sense.

Comments

Parents are all guilty

[Anonymous Coward]

for giving birth to evil people. Arrest them all!

Traffic laundering will soon become a crime

[Anonymous Coward]

We're moving, slowly but surely, towards making your IP address the equivalent of your social security number in the US.

Re:Traffic laundering will soon become a crime

[fustakrakich]

Not until we get IPv6, which will tattooed on your arm.

It's accomplices all the way down!

[Anonymous Coward]

Is the ISP an accomplice too? And the operating system vendor?

It'll come down to an opinion

[TWX]

It'll come down to an opinion as to whether or not the use of Tor implies an intent to allow others to break the law. While an anonymizer service itself can be used for both legal and illegal purposes, if the court later finds that its use is far more illegitimate than it is legitimate, then that will dictate how they rule on the matter.

That's the biggest difference compared to the car analogy, in that the demonstrated legitimate use of cars far, far outweighs the illegitimate use of cars. Using cars is the norm. Using Tor is not the norm, and so then it becomes a matter of scrutinizing what it does, who uses it, and for what purposes.

Same issues held true for networks like Napster and MegaUpload, and holds true for bit torrent.

A few points

[Registered Coward v2]

1. Apparently a final ruling has not been reached. While a court has found the operator guilty it's not clear if that will ultimately hold.

2. None of TFA provide any details of what the ruling was based on, beyond the TOT node being used for illegal activity by someone else. Without more details, it is impossible to conclude that merely running a TOR node is illegal; the only conclusion from TFA is someone was prosecuted for running one. A relationship between the operator and the user committing fraud, or if the operator new the user was using the node of illegal purposes, is vastly different than merely running a node where a user is using it for illegal activities. The former is much more reasonable to prosecute than the latter.

3. As others point out, in keeping with /. traditions, the car analogy is bogus.