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Seattle Police Raid Tor-Using Privacy Activists (thestranger.com)
Frosty Piss writes: Seattle police raided the home of two outspoken privacy activists early on March 30th. Jan Bultmann and David Robinson, a married couple and co-founders of the Seattle Privacy Coalition, were awakened at 6:15 a.m. by a team of six detectives from the Seattle Police Department who had a search warrant to examine their equipment. They claimed to be looking for child pornography, however Bultmann and Robinson believe the raid is because they run a Tor exit node out of their home. They said they operated the node as a service to dissidents in repressive countries, knowing full well that criminals might use it as well, much like any other communication tool. The Seattle Police Department acknowledged that no child porn was found, no assets were seized, and no arrests were made.
Seattle's blog The Stranger notes that the FBI has conducted many other Tor raids across the country, and Friday quoted a tweet from the co-founder of Seattle's Center for Open Policing addressing the police. "You knew about the Tor node, but didn't mention it in warrant application. Y'all pulled a fast one on the judge... you knew the uploader could have been literally anyone in the world."
I read the warrant affidavit (https://www.seattleprivacy.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/154-AFFIDAVITCONDOINTERENTWAVEG401PARKPLACECEN.pdf) and they were not just "searching for child porn" but searching for the uploader of a specific file to a specific post on 4chan.
This specificity makes me think that they sincerely thought they could find the uploader of the child porn clip in question, but didn't understand how TOR works, or how exit nodes work, at least.
If you run an exit node, there's the chance that some pedo is going to use it and their actions are going to be stamped with your IP address.
Given the level of technical knowledge required to understand the technologies involved, I can't even chalk this up to incompetence on the part of the law enforcement officers.
-- My Weblog.
The problem is how do you tell the difference between tor traffic and the couple personally browsing. So it seems like a clever cover if you are participating in illegal activities to run a tor node, get on a legal white list and act with impunity.
God damn privacy advocates. They are probably a bunch of paranoids who think the government is after them too. This should teach them a lesson.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
They knew it was a tor node and knew the warrant was used for harassment only.
Seems like an easy 4th amendment lawsuit. Pre-filled form warrant, Knew it was a tor node, Expert lied to filled out the warrant.
But I guess society lets them do it, over and over and over.
This is a standard (for Slashdot) hit piece against a legitimate police action. Consider a few key details from TFS:
The Seattle Police Department acknowledged that no child porn was found, no assets were seized, and no arrests were made.
In other words, an officer had a reasonable suspicion that something illegal happened that required a search, and convinced a judge of such, which is the entirety of Fourth Amendment protection. The police don't have to convince the public that a search is reasonable. They only have to convince a judge. The judge (and his views on privacy and other issues) is elected in a general election.
In this case, the search ensued, and it's determined that there's no justification for further action (at this time). That's the entirety of the legal process so far. The server operators then chose to buy new hardware and build a new server, but that's their own paranoia, and the police aren't responsible for that.
"You knew about the Tor node, but didn't mention it in warrant application. Y'all pulled a fast one on the judge... you knew the uploader could have been literally anyone in the world."
According to the second (heavily biased) TFA, the detectives learned about the exit node between requesting the warrant and executing the search. Even if known, it doesn't necessarily have to be mentioned in the search warrant. It could be exculpatory, but just as there's no evidence the server operators were responsible for the crime, there's no evidence they weren't.. Are we now assuming that people running Tor exit nodes are now above suspicion? Are they the next group to be unaccountable to the law?
Despite the outrage by the privacy community, and the anti-police bias in TFAs, it looks like everything here happened exactly as it's supposed to, given the current state of the law.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
I hate to be the one defending the cops, but it really sounds like they did things the right way here. They raided a little early, but not in the middle of the night. They knocked on the door instead of ramming it down, they didn't throw flashbangs, they didn't shoot any dogs or anything else for that matter. The cops didn't steal a bunch of unrelated stuff and there were no bullshit charges leveled against the couple.
That's a really low standard for "did the right thing."
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
There is no evidence of a lack of probable cause though. The problem is that there was still an illegal post made from that ip address which was assigned to a physical address and specific people. You still have probable cause to look for evidence that it was made from a computer at the physical address or through the TOR node. Nothing about the node changes that other than possibly clearing the person when the evidence doesn't exist.
The Node highly changes the likelihood that there is evidence of the crime there. Tor exit nodes are designed not to know anything about the sender. This was about posts made from that node. While it is hypothetically possible for a research institution or government agency to modify an exit node, add sniffers, etc..., there is no reason to expect a civilian running an exit node to be doing that. While it is also possible for someone who owns a machine at that address to be the guilty party, the fact that an exit node is present makes it much, much, much less likely. It has a direct impact on the totality-of-the-circumstances analysis someone should use in determining whether PC exists.