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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."
This is pretty much standard operating procedure. They can't outlaw anonymizing services, but they can make running them so much hassle that very, VERY few people want to get involved.
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More about it here...
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Sorry, did you have a traumatic brain injury? I really cant understand your writing...
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
He is a hacker. Goes by the name "Zero Cool"
Presuming they don't have the remote access, maybe they use the opportunity to install some spy/otherware on all these nodes they are 'checking'...
Good point. Seattle Privacy Coalition took their servers off-line and replaced them from the hardware up. The Tor node is still down.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Imagine if nobody ran it from their house, and everybody used a hosting provider. Then all it would need to take over the TOR network would be to subpoena the five most popular hosting providers that control 90% of the market share (I suppose there is such a market share distribution here...).
This is not the first time the Seattle Police have made forays into spying on the citizenry.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
They're not suppose to investigate? The couple running the exit node weren't aware that their equipment could be used to facilitate criminal actions?
Let me paraphrase your comment: THINK OF THE CHILDREN! AND TERRORISTS! WHAT ABOUT THE TERRORISTS!
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Maybe his real name is "Kelvin"?
-- My Weblog.
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.
The real test will be seeing what they do next. If they learned from this raid and generally leave them alone, I have no complaints. If they do this every other week when someone else uses their Tor node for child porn, then and only then is it harassment.
Why, who would have known that the person known pseudonymously on slashdot.org as "Frosty Piss" (id 770223 ) is PRO CHILD PORN AND A TERRORIST SUPPORTER. I mean, that is really surprising that "Frosty Piss" (id 770223 ) LIKES CHILD PORN AND A ROOTS FOR TERRORISTS.
Wow. Just wow.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
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.
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 sounds similar to the search of Free Talk Live in Keene, NH about 2 weeks ago. Early on a Sunday morning, the FBI served a warrant , under which FBI agents walked off with anything with a USB or SATA interface.
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
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.
That will teach you believing in the U.S. Constitution or the Bill of Rights, or anything our founding fathers fought and died for.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
A local report I heard on the radio (KIRO or KPLU, can't find it now) says that one of the cops was enough of a geek to know what TOR was and that is why the issue was cleared up so quickly. I mean how were they going to find out it was an exit node anyway? They got an IP and an location, got a warrant and then went to talk to the guy. Should they have tapped his connection first to find out it was an exit node? How would you tell just from the exit traffic anyway? I suspect they weren't thinking TOR but an unsecured WiFi or a pedo, if the latter then that's why they had the warrant. If an unsecured WiFi then the geek cop could figure that out quickly enough but it would also mean that they were close to the pedo's location and then may have setup their own honeypot WiFi.
Cops don't like TOR because it give false hits like this and take up a lot of time and money.
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
They were using acoustic couplers taped to the phones in the movie. 28.8 baud modems were too new for that. I know, I had a 300 baud acoustic modem way back when...
From:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
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Ohh, so that's why cops don't like TOR. Gotcha!
Yep. Cases they are working go cold. Now in a less free society the things cops may be looking for are what we call human rights, why TOR was invented. But the downside is that when cops are working valid cases trying to protect kids human rights of not getting fiddled with, it hampers the investigation. The cops spent a lot of time on the case and because it turned out to be TOR, they are unhappy. But in the US and the rest of the free world, that is the price we pay for trying to protect those that don't have our rights.
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
One thing we do know for sure - nobody is going to get in any trouble whatsoever over this, except the luckless couple.
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
Part of 'making the US better' involves not buying into the cop-drama bullshit you seem to believe. Read the news sometime.
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.
No, this was handled properly. Suspected illegal activity was investigated and they were quickly found to not be part of it with minimal inconvenience. I'm not sure why this is even a story. Guess what, if you are around a store that gets robbed or some other crimes the cops will investigate also.
Also, "Minimal Inconvenience" compared to what? The guy had six cops show up at his home at 6:15, barge in, intimidate him, watch as he got dressed, etc...
Yes, it's a minimal inconvenience compared to them arresting him or sending him to federal prison. And it's GREAT that somebody on-scene had the good sense to say they don't even have to seize any assets. But it's still a MASSIVE intrusion into his life, one that the Constitution exists to protect him from.
Most cops are trying to go a good job, so when an officer and a judge sign off on this kind of intrusion without better cause, it makes them all look bad, because it means they wind up hurting the community, hurting the trust between the community and the police, and wasting resources that could be spent going after actual criminals.
Don't feed the troll.
Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.
we give them the benefit of the doubt that they were not simply trying to harass.
There's your mistake. You are giving the police the benefit of the doubt. Never do that. Cops lie. Cops are trained to lie. Cops are encouraged to lie. When judges catch them lying, they sometimes scold them, but it's rare that anything serious happens. The next time, the cops will just go to a different judge. One who is more flexible in his thinking when it comes to rights.
-- Will program for bandwidth