...Brave German Tor exit node operator arrested...
...I have sympathy for the guy because the police had trouble understanding his explanation, but really, he put himself in that situation by allowing random people to send bomb threats through his computer...
Versus what ... sending bomb threats through ... the MAIL? So, are you suggesting, equivalently, that we arrest the postal workers in their homes, confiscate their belongings, because they delivered the Unabomber's packages?
Doesn't anyone understand responsibility? (Start here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Responsibility and get back to us in a few day's time!)
From <http://www.cnet.com/surveillance-state/8301-13739_1-9779225-46.html?ta g=head>
"...Tor is a privacy tool designed to allow users to communicate and browse anonymously on the Internet. It's endorsed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation http://www.eff.org/ and other civil liberties groups as a method for whistle blowers and human rights workers to communicate with journalists. Tor provides anonymous Web-browsing software to hundreds of thousands of users around the world, according to its developers. The largest numbers of users are in the United States, the European Union, and China..."
"...The victim here was a guy accepting risk to give people...ability to practice free speech. You are not at risk, but he is/was..."
On 9/27/07, Monahon, Peter B. Peter.Monahon@uspto.gov wrote:
Versus what ... sending bomb threats through ... the MAIL? So, are you suggesting, equivalently, that we arrest the postal workers in their homes, confiscate their belongings, because they delivered the Unabomber's packages?
No, but with that analogy you've basically described an ISP. Being a TOR node is more like unwrapping the packages, then rewrapping them, putting your own address on the back and sending them on.
On 27/09/2007, Stephen Bain stephen.bain@gmail.com wrote:
No, but with that analogy you've basically described an ISP. Being a TOR node is more like unwrapping the packages, then rewrapping them, putting your own address on the back and sending them on.
-- Stephen Bain stephen.bain@gmail.com
The ISP gives you one of the addresses it owns, no? Tor exit IPs are well-published. It is not hard to check if an address is a Tor exit node.
Legally, it is much like an ISP, at least, I believe, by US or UK law. Running a Tor node is being a 'service provider' or 'innocent disseminater', assuming you do not sniff or otherwise mess with the packets. Tor exit node operators don't even have the control of Google - we don't cache web pages, we can't 'take them down'.
But the police are foolish and didn't understand that. They could've seized the computer. They could've asked if he kept logs. (Not that logs would've lead them anywhere besides the second node, but still.) But they don't have a background in computers, they were just angry someone had made a bomb threat.
So yes, he did take that risk. I am taking that risk. When you donate your computer equipment to help other people have privacy and free speech, you can get blamed if they misuse your service.
A number of people on this list seem to want free speech for themselves and their friends, but not for other people. They seem to think they will never get burnt over this, no matter what the law in UK and other countries is.
Well, newsflash - free speech comes at a price. Do you really want to risk getting sued, or allowing Wikipaedia to be sued, to protect speech considered defamatory in the UK? Is defamatory speech worth fighting for? Especially when you could just tell them if they want free speech, go set up a hidden service with Tor.