Re: No good deed...

@Dr Mouse: But he didn't keep logs, which is bordering on destruction of evidence in a child porn case. He could just as easily run a Tor node, keep logs and then provide them to law enforcement officers in the event of a crime. Like any other ISP or service provider would.

Re: No good deed...

"But he didn't keep logs, which is bordering on destruction of evidence in a child porn case."

Tor is provided as an anonymising service. It is used by many people, often for perfectly legitimate purposes, not just paedophiles. He cannot trace where the traffic comes from (a feature of Tor, the data is bounced around the network in such a way that you can't trace it, until it pops out of en exit node). And he would not want to. He has no legal obligation to, and the whole point of Tor is to avoid tracking. Nobody would use it if everything was logged, because it defeats the point of it.

Re: No good deed...

"But he didn't keep logs, which is bordering on destruction of evidence in a child porn case."

What Dr. Mouse said, plus: If you say he should have kept logs since it was within his technical capability to do so, doesn't that imply that our putative laptop repairman should have to do the same? Even if you say, well, actively copying the disk he works on is a different level of thing - what if he has to back up the media and put it on a new disk, since the old one is messed up? Is he obligated to keep the intermediate copy, since it would be 'destroying the evidence' if he did otherwise?

Unless there's been a crime committed and you have knowledge of said crime, you can't 'destroy evidence', otherwise almost anything which could *potentially* have been part of a crime would be sacrosanct. Find a bunch of broken glass in your sidewalk after a hard rain, and sweep it up? Well, it might have been part of a murder! Sure, you don't have any particular reason to believe so since the rain washed away *most* of the blood, but it's still there, so when you cleaned up the glass you were cleaning up a crime scene!

In short, and adjunct to my point above, it's not a private citizen's responsibility to positively vet any action as not being part of a crime. It's been pointed out that you can't get away with hauling a brown paper package for someone - well, this is and isn't true. If you're driving a box across the country for someone, you're (at least in the US) not going to be hauled off to jail for it. But if some guy in a trenchcoat (they all wear those, right?) offers you $4,000 in small, unmarked bills to stick a manila envelope under your shirt and walk through customs, you *do* have a reasonable basis to believe that he just might not be on the up-and-up.

Basically, you can't do stuff that you know damn well is specifically and only going to be used for crime. If this guy had run a server for Vladimir from Ukraine who wanted to host files for his modelling agency and would pay you ten times the going rate, you might be expected to go, "hmmm....". But if you offer a public service to all and sundry, the overwhelming majority of which are almost certainly not criminals, it's unreasonable to expect you to somehow divine who's doing what - and it's also unreasonable to ban private communications because of the potential for abuse.

Re: Change of plan

I think a relay is still pretty safe, assuming that unlike David Hicks, it's the legal risk and not damnation that you're worried about. There have been one or two cases like this one where exit node operators wound up (temporarily) in legal trouble, but I've never heard of a relay operator getting in trouble and it's difficult to imagine a situation where they would, unless Tor itself were illegal where you live.

If you run an exit node, it looks, at least initially, like any traffic "exiting" there is coming from you. With a relay node there should be no such confusion.

Re: TOR:

no it isn't

Tor is a patented United States Navy product which still receives State Department funding.

establishing pseudonymity (near anonymity) is difficult and realistically requires hard cryptographic tools and sophistication. TOR is a fairly easy to use software that unfortunately SHOUTS I AM USING TOR to all and sundry. 'Bad states' can and do investigate and experiment to watch for ‘Tor headers’ and other unique signatures, MTU packet size etc; which are ‘bug doors’ designed in Tor for ‘work factor reduction’ purposes.

https://blog.torproject.org/blog/iran-blocks-tor-tor-releases-same-day-fix

Using Tor, caution is required, as Tor or Cloud Tor is likely to be under extreme surveillance by intelligence agencies and might not provide even pseudonymity if used in, say, Bahrain or Saudi Arabia

Re: Reminds me of a few years back..

A subscription warez service? I doubt it. One of the points of warez is that it is software that you are not prepared to pay money for, and so I doubt how successful such an enterprise would be.

Plus, if this was the golden age as you describe it, warez was everywhere - kickme.to/fosi - no-one was paying for it, let alone a subscription.

You sure this guy didn't just have a personal FTP server hooked up to his shiny network connection? 'Back in the day' the number of dodgy FTP sites covertly run by sysadmins on commercial networks was obscene.

Re: Reminds me of a few years back..

"A subscription warez service? I doubt it. One of the points of warez is that it is software that you are not prepared to pay money for, and so I doubt how successful such an enterprise would be."

Actually, I remember lots of subscription warez services from that era. You tended to get faster connections, larger collections of software, quicker access to newer releases and a single place to look. The subscriptions were small, and if you were after high value software (e.g. professional stuff costing thousands) it was well worth it. Plus, you got less malware in the subscription services.

judge and jury ?

That's the nice thing about these cases - even if it never goes to trial you can bankrupt the person with legal bills, they lose their business because you impounded everything electronic they own for 3years, and then after it's all dropped they are still on your system as a "suspected whatever" so get refused any sort of job that needs a police check.

Actually bothering to have a trial and a conviction is almost unnecessary

Re: judge and jury ?

then after it's all dropped they are still on your system as a "suspected whatever" so get refused any sort of job that needs a police check.

That area of the law needs an overhaul, if you have a criminal record for not wearing a seat belt for example, you shouldn't be turned down for any job that does NOT involve a vehicle.

Re: Indeed

@Frank - If he's got his money in a safety deposit box, he almost certainly is trusting it to bankers.

Anyway, as someone who has worked in UK FI for a while, I had annual training on money laundering, keeping large wads of cash in a safety deposit box is, while not damming, a highly suspicious behavior that would warrant further investigation under anti-money laundering regulations.

Tax Law

Is not the same throughout Europe. Austria has some arcane dodges that let you keep stuff in a safety deposit box with a nominal value to avoid death duties. Families do this as a matter of course, my inheritance included something similar.

Re: Indeed

Oh dear, I had no idea. I also have wads of cash and mobiles stashed away here and there. I pay for everything by cash wherever possible mostly because I'm utterly paranoid about those who decide to store my card details ad infinitum on their chaotic malware ridden servers. (Or *shudder* in teh cloud.)

"A point worth noting is that he is being investigated, he is not being punished. At least, not yet."

This depends on your definition of punishment.

If the cops came to your house, took away all your computers, mobile phones etc, some of which may be part of your business, this could easily be thought of as a punishment.

For example, for myself, it would have a big impact on my life. I only use my mobile phone, so I would loose contact with a lot of people. My computers contain a large amount of my personal data, projects, photos, and many other things. There would be a huge inconvenience, and at this point I would already consider it a punishment.

Then there's my work's laptop. Although all my data is backed up at work, there would be a lot of work to set me up a new workstation. There is also the damage to reputation: In this case, I would likely have to explain to my bosses why the laptop had been seized. if it is on suspicion of child porn, imagine what my bosses would think! Do you really think there would be no impact? I could easily see being suspended from work, and irreparable damage being done to my reputation, even if cleared later.

If you run a computer based business, it would be even worse. Even a few months of investigation could bankrupt a small business. The destruction of a business that someone has worked hard to build, ploughed large amounts of money and time into, is definitely a punishment.

I'm sorry, but I do think that even this "investigation" step is punishment. It may be necessary, but it's still punishment.

This is a common tactic against legitimate porn sites in the USA

The operators are required to keep records showing the models are over 18 - the police have a right to "inspect" those records

This is often interpreted as a right to seize anything that may contain a record = every computer, every disk drive, every digital camera, every video editing console - and take them away for a few months "to be inspected"

>>"I'm sorry, but I do think that even this "investigation" step is punishment. It may be necessary, but it's still punishment."

If you're saying that it's [potentially] necessary to avoid people doing what Danny Bowman suggested some people might be tempted to do, whose 'fault' is the punishment?

Some kind of mix of his, some of the TOR users and the authorities?

Re: What's he done

>>"An ISP isn't held liable for what goes over its network. So, why should anything to do with TOR?"

It's a tricky issue.

It *might* be considered less likely that an ISP would be a cover for an individual's own illegal activity.

An ISP might be more able to help in an ongoing way with an enquiry by allowing future monitoring, or to provide historic data (who was using what IP address at what time) which allowed an investigation to progress.

The second of those things somewhat reinforces the first - the fact that what went where should be traceable is likely to make people working at the ISP fairly unlikely to try doing anything dodgy due to the likelihood of detection.

In the case of someone running an exit node, if they are unable to be of any real help and are thought to be more likely than an ISP to be responsible for some of the offending traffic, it's easy to see why they may be seen differently.

Being honestly unable to help the police shouldn't itself be a crime, nor should simply putting oneself in a position where one is honestly unable to help, but deliberately putting oneself in that position (especially in a situation where it is difficult for anyone else to tell whether dodgy traffic was someone else's or not without significant investigation) is going to make it more likely that one becomes collateral damage in an investigation, and that's something that people choosing to assist others access the internet untraceably should understand.

I understand that if I leave a wifi router open, I'm opening myself to at least having my machines looked at if someone does do something dodgy with my net connection.

However innocent someone might know they are, if their hospitality has been abused in order to help someone commit a crime, they can't expect that there won't be any kind of investigation, or that it won't be inconvenient for them.

In the case of an ISP, being legally regulated, they have some kind of defence - if the law says they have to keep certain data for X months, it effectively also says that getting rid of it after X months is permissible - if they do provide what the law requires that they provide, there would be little justification for seizing machines unless there were unusual grounds for suspicion that they were doing something dodgy themselves and covering it up.

Re: What's he done

>>"Seems to be a matter of ensuring the authorities have control over anyone they want. ISPs are basically under control, but TOR admins etc. are not. So, whilst logically they're doing the same thing (simply providing bandwidth), the TOR admins have to go as they're not under control. Nothing to do with the law or natural justice. Simply ensuring you are powerful and control the world."

But they're not 'simply providing bandwidth' - they are quite intentionally providing anonymity, which ISPs are not doing.

In fact, they're not even 'providing bandwidth' - in reality they are consuming it by bouncing the same data around in ways which are entirely unnecessary for simple communication, but useful for anonymity.

They are not logically doing the same thing as ISPs, as is fairly obvious from the fact that everyone using them has an ISP and is using TOR as an addition.

Re: What's he done

But TOR isn't adding anything to current, just making it simpler and easier. The traffic into TOR is just as visible as traffic without TOR, so no change there. Also, what's the difference between bouncing around various proxies in 'unfriendly' places and going through TOR. Yes, the ISP can tell you where the packets went and you can ask the proxy admin where they went, then the next etc.etc. However, once you meet a proxy in an unhelpful place, the trail stops. So, are we now going to investigate anyone who hosts a proxy for the same reason?

Effectively the misdealings of a few are being used as reason for putting the entire population under surveillance. That's the start of a totalitarian state. Surveillance is always the start point. East Germany and the Stasi would have loved to have some of these laws!! Essentially, what is wrong with people have private conversations or communications?

I guess the TOR network could be setup in such a way that each admin can keep records and reveal them to the authorities on demand (there are other ways of obscuring where the packets are going), but I suspect it wouldn't make any difference. They would still go after the admins as they can't be brought to heel and can appear and disappear as end point much easier and quicker than ISPs do. This smacks totally of control rather than anything else.

Re: What's he done

They are part of a communications path, whether physical infrastructure or logical functionality. Sort of like the various layers of the networking stack. On the basis of your argument, the inventors of SSL should be arrested and thrown in jail for making the packets unreadable!! Perhaps that is a better analogy. What the difference between SSL and TOR. Even if you can tell where the packet went, that doesn't help much unless you know the content. Or, are you going to investigate anyone who once sent or received a network packet from a known paedophile?

Re: What's he done

>>"On the basis of your argument, the inventors of SSL should be arrested and thrown in jail for making the packets unreadable!! "

Please don't misrepresent me.

I'm not remotely trying to argue anyone should be thrown in jail for developing encryption, or for running a proxy server, or a TOR exit point, or for opening up their Wifi to strangers.

I am pointing out that if someone is doing something which could ultimately result in detectable illegal traffic passing across communications links they are responsible for, they can expect one or other authority to be interested if such traffic actually occurs even in the absence of any Great Conspiracy to stamp out TOR.

In the case of ISPs, there will be a fairly consistent positive history of past co-operation of ISPs with legal enquiries, a legal framework regarding what an ISP has to provide in terms of information, and also a 'negative history' of enquiries pretty overwhelmingly turning out to be down to a customer doing something dodgy, not the ISP.

But face PC Plod with J Random Citizen with a net connection which illegal content has travelled over, and it's highly predictable that they will seize obvious hardware until they can satisfy themselves that the traffic *wasn't* that of the individual himself.

It's certainly a pain in the arse for the individual, but hardly an entirely unpredictable one.

Now if there was some way of making decent money out of running an exit node, and one was being run by a multi-employee company which had detailed records of all its internal traffic such that they could identify what went to internal machines and what disappeared into TOR, they might find it easier dealing with an enquiry since the police might trust rather more that they would be being given accurate information, and that people in the company would tend to keep an eye on each other and make sure no-one was abusing the system.

Even something run professionally but for free by volunteers might be in a reasonable position, especially if they have prior legal advice and representation on tap.

Being a one-man-band doing stuff for free seems likely to put someone in a meaningfully worse position even if doing the precise same thing, since the only people who can check on you are the boys in blue.

Re: What's he done

>>"Effectively the misdealings of a few are being used as reason for putting the entire population under surveillance. That's the start of a totalitarian state. Surveillance is always the start point. East Germany and the Stasi would have loved to have some of these laws!! Essentially, what is wrong with people have private conversations or communications?"

What is against the law about people having private conversations?

In times past, operators listened in to phone calls, letters could be opened, and people could be followed to see who they met, but that was by no means an inevitable slippery slope leading to totalitarianism.

I'm sure the Stasi would have absolutely loved people being able to encrypt emails, or untraceably hide messages in other files, or each be able to be their own mini-broadcaster with blogs, etc where messages could also be hidden, or instantly duplicate large mounts of information.

People these days have access to unsnoopable communication that people in the past could only have dreamed of.

Hell, some paranoid person worried about the route of a communication being traced could easily post a memory card with vast amounts of encrypted and obscured data to a trusted friend of their target recipient, knowing that it is useless if intercepted, and that recipient has full plausible deniability.