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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."
"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.
You can't trust what the public will do with such a capability as an anonymizing onion router, so therefore running a Tor exit note is a ticket to having big legal problems, never mind the guns in your face. I wouldn't do it if my life depended on it. I have a wife and kids...
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
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..."
Makes sense, so long as you're also willing to charge every employee of every telecom company as being accessories to terrorism or child porn distribution.
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.
why do we continue to call this "PORN" and not just child exploitation/crime/abuse.
Running a Tor node doesn't mean your intentionally concealing illegal activity. You're aware that political dissidents in other countries, and abuse victims, and others use Tor for perfectly legal purposes, right?
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.
As an ISP you're already required to report address allocation information to the regional registry who makes the associations publicly available. The police know whether they're looking for ISP staff or a customer when they show up at the door because as an ISP you published enough information for them to make that determination.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
As an ISP you're already required to report address allocation information to the regional registry who makes the associations publicly available. The police know whether they're looking for ISP staff or a customer when they show up at the door because as an ISP you published enough information for them to make that determination.
What does any of that have to do with police abuse against people doing nothing illegal?
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
The main difference is that the telecom company isn't helping hide the criminal's point of origin.
Sure they are. They provide cellular service to "burner phones" that can be bought with cash and without ID. I see no ethical difference between that and running a Tor node: both are providing a means for somebody to obscure their identity, which can be used for both good and evil.
Actually, that's NOT "perfectly legal". Improper storage of firearms is a misdemeanor or equivalent in most places.
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.
Just like how a public storage facility lets random people store things?
A lot of countries are cracking down on burner phones. I don't know the regulations where I'm at now (Canada) but I know in Spain, I could not purchase a SIM card without showing my passport.
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 point is that the IP address would be registered to an end user and the police already know who is at the final end point before conducting a raid. The ISP would be subpoenaed for subscriber info first, not get woken up at 6am with a raid. Nothing at all to do with legal regulations.
Yes, like, three of them. The ratio of good vs bad going through Tor routers is abysmal.
The telecoms are responsible for providing a point of origin (account).
And they did.
How do we know they did? Because the cops showed up at the physical address linkable via their records to the IP address.
I had a sucky sig.
Indeed. The rule of thumb to figure out whether to use "me" or "I" is to try the plural.
If you'd say "us", use "me". If you'd say "we", use "I".
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Lame analogy.
Try you lend someone your phone and they use it to make a bomb threat.
Or Lend Someone your smart phone and they use it to watch child porn.
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.
Perhaps the solution is as simple as letting all police departments operate Tor exit nodes. Then they can investigate each other when child porn is posted.
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 .
...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.
Pay-as-you-go SIMs can be bought at pretty much any gas station, 7-11, Mac's, Koodo, Fido, or Virgin booth with cash, without showing ID. Some of them require you to fill in an online form to activate the SIM, but you can put any info in there you want, and "payment" is done using the code on the receipt instead of credit card.
Just went through this process to get a Koodo SIM for friends visiting from Australia. No ID required, no paper trail created.
No regulation on this up here (Canada) that I can see.
A nice improvement would be doing away with the "guns in your face" part. Even if this couple had been the perps that the cops were looking for, what part of of "posting child porn" necessitates an early morning armed raid? Do cops not know how to interact with the public at all anymore besides by kicking down doors and shooting their pets?
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
The ratio of good to bad Anonymous Coward posts is abysmal too, yet we still allow you to speak here.
Good-bye
They're allowing encrypted traffic to traverse their network. How's that any different than folks hosting a Tor exit node?
The real question here is, how did the police discover this IP address was associated with CP? As I understand it, and maybe I'm wrong, but if you're finding CP that came from the Tor network, then you know that the exit node that the offending data came out of wouldn't have been the source. How would a warrant have been granted based on such loose evidence? I mean, this type of situation should be happening more often, no? Seems like every Tor exit node would be raided at some point, because Tor is used for so much illegal activity.
Following the same set of logic exhibited here, UPS and FedEX should be raided every 3 hours.
Politics; n. : A religion whereby man is god.
You should have thought about your Wife and Kids before you posted on Slashdot.