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Judge Who Authorized Police Search of Privacy Activists Wasn't Told About Tor

thestranger.com

41–50 of 236 posts

Re: Judge Who Authorized Police Search of Privacy Activists Wasn't Told About Tor

#41
post #2

This is probably what I find most worrying about the TOR concept. By running an exit node, you open yourself up to all sorts of legal actions. But if you can't run a TOR exit node as an average citizen, won't all exit nodes end up being run by NSA, GCHQ, and their ilk?

Best practices for running an exit node cover most of these concerns.[0] The most important one the individuals here didn't follow is 'don't run your relay from home.' A properly registered tor exit relay running in a datacenter somewhere will attract a courteous inquiry, rather than a 6am raid. [0] https://blog.torproject.org/running-exit-node

Yea but that means you have to spend extra money to run a Tor node, again limiting the amount of nodes that people are willing to run. The solution is for more people to run Tor, not fewer. Same with open Wifi nodes, the more the safer.

Re: Judge Who Authorized Police Search of Privacy Activists Wasn't Told About Tor

#43
post #34

what difference would it have made if the Judge was told about it?

He could do his job effectively by asking for more information about what Tor is. This understanding may impact his decision to issue the warrant. Law enforcement lied by omission, do you think they would take that risk if they thought the outcome would stay the same?

They provided enough evidence to the judge to convince him that there was child pron at this location. I'm not sure how knowing there is a TOR node would have made much of a difference.

Re: Judge Who Authorized Police Search of Privacy Activists Wasn't Told About Tor

#44
post #25
post #11

Money quote in the last paragraph: "When we get into things like this," [Judge William Downing] said, "anonymizing stuff, that’s well over my head technologically, then it becomes very murky and hazy." That sounds to me like the judge likely wouldn't have known what a TOR node was if the police had told him these guys were running one. Technology isn't slowing down, so how can we make sure the law keeps up?

He is willing to admit that it goes over his head, which presumably also means that he'd be willing to read up on it or seek advice if necessary. The biggest problem isn't judges who doesn't know everything - they have to deal with cases covering every possible discipline and can't possibly know everything about everything put before them. The problem is when they believe they do, or don't care, or don't want to admi…

Or when a judge is given a request with missing information and he can't ask an expert, do research, or say, "Wait, what is a Tor Exit Node and why did you mention it in your report?"

The point of this article is given the fact that they left that off then he can't reasonably ask for more information.

Re: Judge Who Authorized Police Search of Privacy Activists Wasn't Told About Tor

#45
post #2

This is probably what I find most worrying about the TOR concept. By running an exit node, you open yourself up to all sorts of legal actions. But if you can't run a TOR exit node as an average citizen, won't all exit nodes end up being run by NSA, GCHQ, and their ilk?

It really shouldn't be illegal, it should be protected, like free speech, as noted in the article, "It's like raiding the mailman's house for delivering an illegal letter with no return address" In fact I think that's why they withheld the fact that he runs a TOR node from the judge.

Its more like getting a warrant to search his house because they found drugs in his car, but not bothering to mention to the judge that "his" car was a rental car he took out from the airport Hertz a month ago.

Re: Judge Who Authorized Police Search of Privacy Activists Wasn't Told About Tor

#46
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You still can but, make sure you don't do it in your house. Even one of the operators said, I guess I should have rented a server for this. Not that I agree with the warrant however, I'm not putting my dog's and children's lives in danger.

This is the advice given by a few people, but I'm not sure how valid it is. If the police have probable cause to search a server at a datacenter, then they would likely also have probable cause to search the computers of the owner's of those servers. In which case, we're back to 6am raids (probably done at the same time as the datacenter raid to prevent evidence tampering)

Check out https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/GoodBadISP...

Find one that accepts Bitcoin. Use a pseudonym, and a throwaway email address. Find a plausible meatspace address and telephone number online. Maybe a hostel, business hotel, restaurant that just closed, etc.

Re: Judge Who Authorized Police Search of Privacy Activists Wasn't Told About Tor

#47
Let me pay devil's advocate for a moment: let's say I want to do bad things on the Internet and obviously I don't want to get my house raided. So now I set up a Tor node in my house. Doing that I created reasonable doubt and my house can't get raided.

Re: Judge Who Authorized Police Search of Privacy Activists Wasn't Told About Tor

#48
post #38

If my job requires me to have an understanding of something new, I learn it. Like an adult. Why the hell is technology the only exception for people on this front?

Technology is not an exception. He isn't exempt from making informed decisions. Law enforcement omitted a fact that could lead to the judge asking questions.

Re: Judge Who Authorized Police Search of Privacy Activists Wasn't Told About Tor

#49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's actually really sad because I was wanting to see if I could implement an exit node all by myself as a side proejct, but then I realized the potential danger I'd be putting myself in. Naturally, I'd have to host it to test it, so I had to throw this one to the way-side

You still can but, make sure you don't do it in your house. Even one of the operators said, I guess I should have rented a server for this. Not that I agree with the warrant however, I'm not putting my dog's and children's lives in danger.

A search warrant puts your childrens' lives in danger. How fucked up is that?

Re: Judge Who Authorized Police Search of Privacy Activists Wasn't Told About Tor

#50
post #11

Money quote in the last paragraph: "When we get into things like this," [Judge William Downing] said, "anonymizing stuff, that’s well over my head technologically, then it becomes very murky and hazy." That sounds to me like the judge likely wouldn't have known what a TOR node was if the police had told him these guys were running one. Technology isn't slowing down, so how can we make sure the law keeps up?

The judge wouldn't have known what a Tor node is—but that's not a bad thing. What he's saying here is that the facts as originally presented to him translated into a well-known "cached" judgement; but the facts as they actually were would require original thought and research on his part (and/or those of analysts working for the judge) to come to a decision. "Guy has child porn on his computer" has a clear-cut answer; "open proxy server contains child porn" is indeed much less clear-cut. What the law says about that subject is murky; hazy, even. It's something you would need to think about.

And this thinking is, in practice, what the vast majority of a judge's every-day job is: to Do The Research—to become experts in the things they're asked to rule on, to build up the context necessary to discriminate between assertions made to them by opposed parties. Judges are already experts on the law; but that only helps when the law is already so well-established that a judge isn't even necessary. In most cases, the law is vague: it doesn't already have the answer for what should happen in this particular case, with these particular facts. The point of the judge is to decide what the law should be—to gather facts about the world, and use them to answer a question in a way that sets legal precedent going forward.

Everyone else in the court's job is, then, to feed the judge all the necessary facts about the case, on both sides, so that the judge can know just what subjects must be made clear—must be researched, or questioned, or followed up on—before the case can be decided.

(Even the irrelevant statements; the judge is the one expected to know what the law must blind itself to, so the judge wants to hear everything, and then cull the pile of statements themselves. When a jury is present and must be the one to decide, the judge will attempt to moderate the jury using this same legal-blinding... but with mixed results. In jury trials, you'll see judges trying to keep attorneys from making certain assertions that might irreparably bias a jury; but in non-jury trials, judges just want all the information they can get.)

In short: as long as judges are doing their jobs, the law keeps up. That's what we pay judges to do. If the law isn't keeping up, we've just hired some bad judges.

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