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Cops Are Raiding Homes of Innocent People Based Only On IP Addresses (fusion.net)
Kashmir Hill has a fascinating story today on what can go wrong when you solely rely on IP address in a crime investigation -- also highlighting how often police resort to IP addresses. In the story she follows a crime investigation that led police to raid a couple's house at 6am in the morning, because their IP address had been associated with the publication of child porn on notorious 4chan porn. The problem was, Hill writes: the couple -- David Robinson and Jan Bultmann -- weren't the ones who had uploaded the child porn. All they did was voluntarily use one of their old laptops as a Tor exit relay, a software used by activists, dissidents, privacy enthusiasts as well as criminals, so that people who want to stay anonymous when surfing the web could do so. Hill writes: Robinson and Bultmann had [...] specifically operated the riskiest node in the chain: the exit relay which provides the IP address ultimately associated with a user's activity. In this case, someone used Tor to make the porn post, and his or her traffic had been routed through the computer in Robinson and Bultmann's house. The couple wasn't pleased to have helped someone post child porn to the internet, but that's the thing about privacy-protective tools: They're going to be used for good and bad purposes, and to support one, you might have to support the other.Robinson added that he was a little let down because police didn't bother to look at the public list which details the IP addresses associated with Tor exit relays. Hill adds: The police asked Robinson to unlock one MacBook Air, and then seemed satisfied these weren't the criminals they were looking for and left. But months later, the case remains open with Robinson and Bultmann's names on police documents linking them to child pornography. "I haven't run an exit relay since. The police told me they'd be back if it happened again," Robinson said; he's still running a Tor node, just not the end point anymore. "I have to take the threat seriously because I don't want my wife or I to wake up with guns in our faces."Technologist Seth Schoen, and EFF Executive Director Cindy Cohn in a white paper aimed at courts and cops. "For many reasons, connecting an individual to a crime linked to an IP address, without any additional investigation, is irresponsible and threatens the civil liberties of innocent people."
Tor exit node = child sex offender.
and they can slap down some accessory to crime as well on you as you are helping people do stuff on the tor network by running an exit node.
"The police told me they'd be back if it happened again." For what crime? Is it normal for police in Canada to threaten to invade an innocent couple's home for doing something legal?
It's /. so here we go. If you let anyone use your car, no questions asked, then you wouldn't be surprised if the cops traced the plates back to your house when it was used in a crime.
If only there was some rule, like a Rule 41, that the police could use to try to investigate who was using Tor instead of raiding the exit nodes? A rule that would let them try to find the actual computer at the other end?
Breaking news : Cops raid refrigerator for uploading porn .
It's probably not a good idea to use Tor anymore. There was a time when it was very useful, especially as a tool for journalists and dissidents ETC.
My main use for it was as a remote testing platform. Which it excelled at. Heck- I even wrote a small section of the Tor website regarding Tor's use by IT professionals.
Now... there's so much scrutiny on the system that your presence there basically gets you tagged as "suspicious".
My decision to stop using Tor was based on the apparent numbers of pedophiles that were hiding on the darknet. In an effort to not be confused with "them"- I stopped using it.
YMMV- it's a risky proposition. If you've ever run an exit node (not me!!) you are a potential target for misguided law enforcement. Plus the fact you may be unwittingly be aiding illegal activity as a middle man node.
Not for me. Make sure you understand what you are doing if you participate.
Another consultant who stuck it out.
"We are the Priests, of the Temples of Syrinx..."
That's the problem with Tor: Most people aren't brave enough (and, rightfully so) to operate an exit node because of the law enforcement repercussions. So, the only people that can operate exit nodes without repercussions is law enforcement. Which defeats the purpose of Tor.
Could smart criminals just also run a Tor exit node, and just use it to blame anything that they get caught on?
It's one thing for libraries and nonprofits to operate them, but as a private citizen running one? Your misguided attempt to help some people will almost certainly end up badly for you because of bad people using that goodwill to do bad things.
To be perfectly honest, reading the linked story I was quite surprised the end result of the police visit was as positive as it was. I fully expected the cops to not know or care what Tor was and just round everyone and everything up and let the courts deal with it, which has happened several other times. Which again reinforces my point that there are precedents that show running a Tor exit node is just bad news and if you are still doing it, you're playing with fire.
Could smart criminals just also run a Tor exit node, and just use it to blame anything that they get caught on?
A Tor exit node is just a tool used to obscure your location. Nothing more. So let's rephrase your question as such:
"Could smart criminals just tape over their house numbers, and just use it to blame anything that they get caught on?"
AKA The Spartacus Defense
why do we continue to call this "PORN" and not just child exploitation/crime/abuse.
They just intimidated them into closing it, got what they came for.
Are you people really that big of suckers?
Are abhorrent and were supposed to be only used in exceptional circumstances when armed resistance was very likely. Now police request them and judges approve them for every kind of crime...
Me is still a word. It should not be replace with "I" in all cases because you think it makes you sound more intelligent.
The only thing worse than a Democrat is a Republican.
Can a jury look at CP? You own legal team? expert witness?
In a case what if some takes it to court (does not take the plea deal) and demands an jury trail?
What you legal needs the logs / system to prove that it was not from your systems? If they try to say they give that out then they in possession of CP.
1. Put a gun on a table in my front yard.
2. Put a sign on the table that says "gun, loaded, for public use. please return when finished"
3. Forget about it
Imagine the outrage when the cops come asking ME about what somebody ELSE did with the gun.
10% of all Tor traffic is used by such people. The rest are people engaged in some degree or another of crime. (Unfortunately, I can't find the citation.)
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
At least, not on their own, in determining who's house to send a SWAT team to. Not even counting TOR, there's numerous other reasons why one's IP could be used for criminal purposes without their knowledge. Perhaps they (albeit stupidly) have an unlocked WiFi network. Perhaps their WiFi password gets cracked. Perhaps they never changed the default and somebody got in. LEOs should not be allowed to raid someone's property based on an IP alone.
Could smart criminals just also run a Tor exit node, and just use it to blame anything that they get caught on?
Sure. They could also just use Tor, which would provide protection against more difficult analysis techniques. Running an exit node to hide unprotected traffic would be a weaker defense than just using Tor. Tor makes network analysis very difficult. But, running an exit node to hide your own traffic probably wouldn't work as well. Because the criminal is not using Tor him- or herself, the latency, for example would be much lower. Another smart person who captures all the traffic could probably determine which connections belong to the owner and which are from the exit node. Just piping the traffic through Tor would not have this flaw.
Could smart criminals just also run a Tor exit node, and just use it to blame anything that they get caught on?
A Tor exit node is just a tool used to obscure your location. Nothing more. So let's rephrase your question as such:
"Could smart criminals just tape over their house numbers, and just use it to blame anything that they get caught on?"
Uh... no...
A Tor exit node is the last "hop" or "layer" before data exits the encrypted tor network.
So let's rephrase the parent's question as such:
"Could smart criminals just operate a package exporting company and just blame other people when they get caught for exporting contraband?"
The answer is yes.
Here's a real-world example from just this week. I'm a moderator on a site on the StackExchange network. We had a problem user who was posting a bunch of stuff the community didn't want posted (consistently badly moderated). What I'm supposed to do in this circumstance is point said user to our instructions for writing acceptable posts. However, such users often are just sock-puppet accounts for someone who's already been suspended. If that's the case, I'm supposed to take more drastic action.
SE has a (community-mod only) link for this, that shows you the user's IP, and all user accounts that have used that user's same IP. I click on this, and discover that he happens to share an IP with one of our better users. Not only is the writing style completely different (writing style is practically a fingerprint), but this user has in fact voted to close all but one post the problem user has ever made.
I talked to the "good" user about this, and he confirmed that his work access point is shared by a very large number of other people.
Just this week we got another new problem user. Again, totally different style than the other two users mentioned above, but also same IP.
As an investigative tool, IP address is useful, but only as a piece of evidence. I'd place it somewhere down with blood-type (perhaps like sharing an uncommon blood type like AB), rather than up in the realm of fingerprints.
The cops just shoot you for operating a TOR exit node. But hey no, we don't live in a police state...
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
They could have conducted the raid at 6am at night.
> ...led police to raid a couple's house at 6am in the morning...
is no one going to talk about the line "child porn on notorious 4chan porn."?
No, because if they tried, the police would come to their door at 6am, with guns in case these smart criminals also had guns and a willingness to use them. The police would then inspect the physical tor exit node and discover whether or not the traffic originated from it, or from a tor relay that sent information to it.
Holy fuck people, some pedophile uploaded porn to 4chan, and the slashdot crowd acts like it is a problem that this resulted in police with guns knocking on someone's door. Get a grip people, this is actually exactly how the venn diagram overlap of pedophiles Tor(tm) and the police is supposed to look like. Now, I didn't actually RTFA (this is slashdot afterall), but certainly competent police would factor in the reasonable likelyhood of these tor exit node operators being the guilty child pornographer targets, and adjust their engagement tactics appropriately. It's not an uncommon thing for police to knock on doors that have a 90% chance of being inhabited by purely innocents, and a 10% chance of holding a dangerous possibly armed suspect. This is pretty much the most ordinary part of what they do. Of course human society as a whole is so relatively bad/inneficient/stupid that often incompetent police are in such situations, and instead of merely real threats being addressed, even worse secondary consequences transpire. But I didn't see a lot of that in the summary. Sounded to me like the cops wanted to check on the computer that uploaded the child porn to 4chan, and make sure the case wasn't so simple they could just cuff the people physically nearest to that computer. That didn't turn out to be the case, and nobody got cuffed.
Seriously people, just because we want to facilitate dissident free speech against all the tyrants that the U.S. aren't willing to be world police against...
What does any of that have to do with police abuse against people doing nothing illegal?
Police are responsible for **investigating** crimes. Sometimes this means surprising people so that evidence can not be destroyed. From the summary it seems that the the residents told the police they operate a TOR exit node, the police looked at a laptop and left. The resident is a bit naive thinking that being on a public list of TOR exit nodes should have made the search unnecessary. Being on that list does not indicate that the resident is not the uploader the police are looking for, just that they are unlikely to be that person but it still needs to be **investigated** to rule them out. That what a lot of **investigation** is, ruling innocent people out as suspects.
Poor analogy. Tor exit nodes don't store anything. It's a relay that people use in order to obscure the place they came from.
Here's a better analogy. Imagine if a wanted criminal ran inside an open-door city shop in order to dodge the police, and the police then charged the shop owners as an accessory to evading law enforcement.
Poor analogy. Here is a better analogy.
Imagine if a wanted criminal ran inside an open-door city shop in order to dodge the police, and the police questioned the shop owners to confirm that they were the shop owners and not the criminal.
Could smart criminals just also run a Tor exit node, and just use it to blame anything that they get caught on?
Only if the police were dumb enough to look at a list of Tor exit nodes, find the IP there, and decide not to investigate the owner of that IP.
This reminds me of a late-90s first-dotcom-boom service that was planned to be like Napster, for long-distance phone calls. The general idea was that you'd run a server program on your pc that made your winmodem and phone line available for others to use for making phone calls that were long-distance for them (over the internet), but local and free for you.
It was a great idea, until assholes started using it to make anonymous bomb threats using other people's phone numbers. I think the service lasted for maybe 2 months before it shut down.
You should use Tor — and other systems intended to enhance privacy — just to keep it legal to use them. Rights not exercised are rights lost. This is also why you should be able to burn somebody's Holy Book every once in a while, refuse police' request to search your car, and carry (or, at least, own) a firearm.
Yep, that may very well have been the objective (even if secondary): let's go, guys, either we bust the porn-peddler this morning, or, at least, put the fear of God into these proxy-running hippies.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Cops do this because people are usually home and aren't prepared to defend themselves at that time. Doing it at 9pm on a Friday would be a bad idea - you'd probably either be out, or alternatively already 3 or 4 beers in and more likely to fight back in some fashion.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
don't sweat it, 70% of statistics are just made up anywayz
Where's the outrage over this clearly discriminatory & biased behaviour on behalf of law enforcement against geeks.
Ok, yeah that's overboard, not meant to diminish the real intolerable loss of life due to unjustified police shootings.
HOWEVER, the point I was trying to make is that this is all 'part & parcel' of the larger issue which is that law enforcement and government in general has 0 respect for 'individual civilian rights'. We are being treated as children and 'criminals' by default whereby the government & law enforcement believe they must 'keep us in our place' or even that they must 'protect us' because of some mistaken belief we can't protect ourselves. We are the employers THEY are the employees. Its our responsibility to remind them of that relationship (through non-violent means of course).
In this instant case, the police can't just be allowed to walk away without sanctions with a 'O, sorry, we made a mistake. And really it wasn't a mistake so we're going to keep watching you and come back again if you don't straighten out this behaviour'. If a citizen committed a crime of an 'oops, I'm sorry I meant to rob someone else' would be no defence for being charged with a crime.
Perhaps put a different way I can't claim 'ignorance of the law' as a defence for breaking the law. Law enforcement can't claim 'ignorance of technology' (or 'ignorance of reality') as an excuse for committing a crime. 'Good intentions' simply doesn't cut it when law enforcement has been 'ceded' power over individuals they are expected to serve simply due too the nature of their job (e.g. 'citizens need to obey orders of law enforcement'). For law enforcement to be ceded this power they must be ABOVE the standards of behaviour that the rest of society behaves under...e.g. again a 'mistake' should be rare, not a daily occurrence.
Last year this happened to me! I had run misc. anonymous networks at home to understand the concepts better (I ran a TOR exit node for about 2 months/ Alongside I2P); and for my own development process(es).. FBI came along with the local police to take every piece of electronic device I owned.. along with all my code that I had been working on for years. I also lost my job (doing telework) of 5 + years because my work laptop was taken also..and the FBI had to contact my work (at a well known bank) for them to decrypt the laptop.. I was let go a few days afterwards without reason and my neighbors never talk to me now . This really fu*ked up my life for about a year, just getting back on track now. Its absolute bullshit ! Its been about a year now and have yet to get back any of my property (not that Id use it); but its really screwed up how they can manipulate the courts by tossing around the "child porn" verbiage when they really have no evidence otherwise. Where did that leave me?? FUC*ED..thats where...ha My lawyers advised against any attempt to retaliate against the FBI. Im really curious if anyone else out there is working on any sort of group legal action to be taken up with the FBI about this... we are citizens and should not be treated this way. Hell, no one should be presumed to be doing something illegal just because they are using anonymous networks .
sooo police monitors 4chan enough they can spot pedo stuff before the message is moderated or falls into oblivion (they have a posting system that makes stuff dissapear after either inactivity or more recent threads posted, its something like that, so they have to be monitoring that constantly to catch stuff like this
this doesnt sound plausible at fucking all, as it does not sound plausible they did not check if the ip was a tor node before waking up on that ungodly hour to perform a raid while you could be happily in bed, so the other option is they themselves, and by they i mean THE POLICE, uploaded the pedo porn to the chan using tor so they could raid this address and frighten these RETARDS that were running an exit node when everybody and their MAMA knows not to do that unless you are some kind of organization
remember the hacking team software? remember the module that it had thats designed to upload pedo porn to frame people? well that software is mainly bought by police and security forces around the globe, so before you acuse me of conspiracy theory, take that known fact into consideration
Running an exit node might provide plausibly deniability in court though.
...to suppress the use of TOR and it's ever growing list of alternatives. I'm surprised they didn't break heads and steal their equipment while they were at it.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
I don't know how such a thing could be measured.
I don't know about a jury, but I know a cop who dealt with "cybercrime" which included this. From what I gather, it's pretty much (a hated part of) his job to comb through a seized machine looking for the evidence, whatever form that may take.
Before feminism men married female children, pleb.
Deuteronomy 22, 28-29, hebrew allows rape of young girls (man keeps girl, pays father).
Anyone opposed to Deuteronomy, who entices one to follow another God/Judge/Ruler is to die. (See: Deuteronomy)
But if that cop can look at it then your defense team better have the same rights and if not you must acquit
They all get executed?
Here's a question: Why would they face guns in their faces for child porn?
Now before you go off, no I'm not naive enough to think it doesn't happen. I know it DOES happen, I just think it's ridiculous the police WILL do this for a non-violent crime. Ugh, again disclaimer child porn is horrible and very damaging to minors. Just don't think a raid for child porn requires guns to faces.
Or, imagine that you're in football field, full of libraries of Congress.
Think of the people who receive/re-ship stolen merchandise that were most likely purchased with stolen credit cards. Can they really argue, that they are just performing a service like a mailboxes etc, and not committing a crime?
(If at first you don't succeed, do it different next time!)
next time quote from the holy texts of the church of the subgenius. Or flying spaghetti monster. Just as relevent.
you let a stranger ride in your car with you, they have drugs on them but you didn't know.... are you still responsible? nobody forced you to take them you volunteered to...
It doesn't make sense, smart criminals wouldn't attract the police, they would just use tor, there is no gain in running an exit node.
If the couple in question didn't unlock their notebook to prove their innocence they would face a legal battle to get it back from the State.
In the same situation, the criminal would lose his electronics and keep praying for the statute of limitations to go faster than the technology to unlock computers (or an image of his HD) with current cryptography.
It depends what your definition of child porn is. In cases where it's very clear cut the court would probably take the investigator's word for it, but in the UK at least it can include things like children's clothes magazines and TV shows if the police think you have been jacking off to them. In that case the jury might see them and the defendant might explain why they had them.
There have also been cases where young looking adult actors in porn were claimed to be child porn. There was a prominent lawyer who exposed a lot of police corruption and improper behaviour, so they tried to manufacture child sexual offences against him. The jury accepted that the man in the video in question was an adult and found him not guilty.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
A huge number of internet users connect by way of DSL in some fashion or other. I would guess that 90+% of these users connect via a rotating IP connector: as a user connects, they are assigned an IP address by way of a rotating pool. When they disconnect, the ip address their computer was using is released back into the pool. You have no control when you connect what your IP address will be. If you are leasing your IP address from ICANN, then fine, your IP address is assigned and fixed. Otherwise, you are random. It really is wacky bananas crazy that cops are beating down someone's door because of a random IP address.
If you willfully allow criminals to use your IP, then how can you not expect a visit from the police? The police may not know much about the occupants until there. Will a pedophile shoot at the police (https://www.policeone.com/Officer-Safety/articles/5995497-2-deputies-shot-during-child-porn-raid/), or are they just dealing with a proxy? You cannot hang loaded firearms outside your front door for anyone to use anonymously, then complain when ballistics come back to you, because you were not the actual shooter.
I bet the quote's from CSI-Cyber
... Don't do things authorities do not like. Really, it's that simple: no disobeisance, no problem. Is it that hard to understand? Life can be simple. Why complicate it? It's a hard world as it is now. Why make it harder on yourself? Toe the line. It's easy.
Well the wrong people exercising their rights without thinking of others is why the OP can't exercise theirs. Now you know why you can't have nice things.
And like 42% of statistics it is made up on the spot.
https://www.demonsaw.com/
"Demonsaw looks like normal web traffic. You can use demonsaw anywhere without being blocked or monitored by anyone.
Governments, corporations, and ISPs will never know what you're communicating or sharing."
IP logging on such a site is very unresponsible. They know, that users do stuff that can get them into trouble, mostly without bad intend, they know they can be forced to give access to the logs. So they should make sure they do not have logs. Hash the IPs with a salt to be able to ban, delete the raw ips within hours.
4chan blocks TOR users.
this story is propaganda.
Running an exit node might provide plausibly deniability in court though.
That's why the police searched the laptop. If files were present it wouldn't be from Tor. The IP is just probably cause for a search, Tor exit node or not.
some pigs families get swatted.