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

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

#61

Post by johansch »

vidarh wrote: post #25
jobu wrote: 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…

If I were in the position of that judge I would like to be able to bring experts on my own. Is that possible?

(I wouldn't trust either the defense nor the prosecution to provide me with neutral information via their selected experts.)

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

#62

Post by rayiner »

Synaesthesia wrote: post #3
Freak_NL wrote: 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.

Given that most of the content on Tor is illegal,[1] I'm not sure the mail is really the appropriate analogy.

[1] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2016/02/survey_of_the...

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

#63

Post by jakobegger »

ajmurmann wrote: post #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.

I think that traffic originating from an IP address is very weak evidence, regardless of whether someone runs a Tor node or not. With all the malware and insecure, unsupported software running everywhere, it might be more likely than not that random illegal traffic is coming from IPs whose owners are oblivious.

I would hope that law enforcement has more evidence than just an IP in a server log when they raid your place.

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

#64

Post by derefr »

bargl wrote: post #44
vidarh wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Right. This is somewhat the point of the oppositional trial system; we can't expect a biased party to bring up all facts relevant to the case, so we bring in someone else with the opposite bias to give the judge the rest of the facts.

In these expedited judicial-request hearings, there isn't an explicit defendant, so there's no oppositional counsel to bring in. Maybe we need to bring back the concept of a "devil's advocate"...

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

#65

Post by mulmen »

noonespecial wrote: post #45
Synaesthesia wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Except in this case Bultmann and Robinson are Hertz, not the customer. They also knowingly rented to a drug dealer.

Another analogy may be running a Hertz in Saudi Arabia and renting to women without male guardians present.

The computer is not rented, they were in control of a device that may have been used to distribute child pornography. They themselves claim to know and understand this but feel that the risk of enabling criminal behavior is outweighed by the benefits to society of the "good" crime. Such as expression of dissent against regimes they disagree with.

I'm not convinced this search was unreasonable from a legal perspective. I do not know enough about the legal precedent around running a Tor node but I could understand if they are on the hook for what happens with their node. I respect what they are doing and I don't think what they are doing is wrong morally but they are taking on a risk which they believe is outweighed by the benefit.

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

#66

Post by tomjakubowski »

Arzh wrote: post #54
bcook wrote: post #23

PSA: "Tor", not "TOR". https://www.torproject.org/docs/faq.html.en#WhyCalledTor "Note: even though it originally came from an acronym, Tor is not spelled “TOR”. Only the first letter is capitalized. In fact, we can usually spot people who haven't read any of our website (and have instead learned everything they know about Tor from news articles) by the fact that they spell it wrong."

People still do that crap with Go (Golang) for no damn reason, it'll never stop because even if they have read that they don't care.

Read what? Isn't it just a way to disambiguate the language from the game or the verb?

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

#67

Post by mulmen »

jakobegger wrote: post #63
ajmurmann wrote: post #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.

I think that traffic originating from an IP address is very weak evidence, regardless of whether someone runs a Tor node or not. With all the malware and insecure, unsupported software running everywhere, it might be more likely than not that random illegal traffic is coming from IPs whose owners are oblivious. I would hope that law enforcement has more evidence than just an IP in a server log when they raid your pla…

Can you give an example of such evidence and how it would be gathered? I don't disagree with you but I can see both sides of this.

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

#68

Post by gambiting »

bcook wrote: post #23

PSA: "Tor", not "TOR". https://www.torproject.org/docs/faq.html.en#WhyCalledTor "Note: even though it originally came from an acronym, Tor is not spelled “TOR”. Only the first letter is capitalized. In fact, we can usually spot people who haven't read any of our website (and have instead learned everything they know about Tor from news articles) by the fact that they spell it wrong."

I usually say "TOR" because "Tor" means "track" my language so people can get confused and writing it in all capitals makes it clearer.

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

#69

Post by jakobegger »

noonespecial wrote: post #45
Synaesthesia wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Slightly improved analogy: They found drugs in his car, but didn't tell the judge that he left his keys in the car so that anybody could use it.

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

#70

Post by Arzh »

tomjakubowski wrote: post #66
Arzh wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People still do that crap with Go (Golang) for no damn reason, it'll never stop because even if they have read that they don't care.

Read what? Isn't it just a way to disambiguate the language from the game or the verb?

Context will do that for you in 99% of the cases, the other 1% is people who are confused for about 15 seconds.
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