Euthanize everyone over 40.
Even those of us that know how to (and even do) operate a tor node?
Judge Who Authorized Police Search of Privacy Activists Wasn't Told About Tor
131–140 of 236 posts
Re: Judge Who Authorized Police Search of Privacy Activists Wasn't Told About Tor
#132I'm all for privacy technologies like Tor, but this is one of the risks you assume when you operate an exit node. The alternative would be to give all Tor exit node operators not only legal immunity, but immunity from investigation, for illegal activities originating from any IP address associated with them. Even if the judge and the police were aware of the exit node, it wouldn't have changed the way this was invest…
Suppose I'm AT&T and one of my customers is running a Tor exit node. Do I now have "immunity from investigation, for illegal activities originating from any IP address associated with them"? I can certainly use a router spoof my customer's IP address for any connections I want to use for illegal activity. Then the IP address will trace back to that customer, which is a Tor exit node, and the police can't investigate me.
For that matter, every user of Tor is in the same situation.
But the premise is wrong. The police can investigate you as much as they like, they just can't assume that the traffic coming from that IP address has anything to do with anyone in particular.
You're still going to jail when you buy something with a stolen credit card and have it shipped to your house, regardless of whether you used Tor or operated a Tor exit node or are an ISP and used an IP address assigned to a customer.
Re: Judge Who Authorized Police Search of Privacy Activists Wasn't Told About Tor
#133Here's what I don't understand: You go to a judge for a warrant and the only piece of evidence you have an IP address . How is an IP address even remotely considered "evidence" enough to search someone's home? An IP address is not an identity. It is not a location. It is not even permanent in most cases! I cannot fathom that police are granted warrants to search and seize people's homes and property based solely on,…
There's a huge difference between evidence strong enough to convict someone (it's reasonably held that an IP address is not good enough evidence to charge a person with a crime) and probable cause for a warrant. I'd argue it's more than adequate to get a warrant.
Again, a warrant is only having reasonable suspicion to go look and see if something illegal is going on, it's not a determination of guilt.
Re: Judge Who Authorized Police Search of Privacy Activists Wasn't Told About Tor
#134Point of clarification: I know the police are allowed to lie and fudge the truth to suspects and defendant, but is there a legal requirement for them to be forthcoming and truthful to Judges in warrants? Also, tending to agree that even if they had included TOR in the search warrant, the judge would have most likely signed it anyways becasue child porn is a big "must do something" thing, and the technology would have…
Yes, there is. See Franks v. Delaware: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franks_v._Delaware The instant case is one of material omission rather than false statement, but there is a substantial amount of case law recognizing that material omissions should be treated the same as false statements.
You might be answering a slightly different question. If there is material omission, the "poisonous fruits of the illegal search" conducted under the fraudulent warrant may be inadmissible in a trial.
But that's separate than whether the intentional omission is itself illegal. Is there any legal consequences for a law enforcement agency to mislead a judge through omission to obtain a search warrant?
Clearly these sort of omissions are happening, especially in the context of parallel construction, and arguably they are technically perjury, but have there been any cases where law enforcement officials have received punishment for this?
Re: Judge Who Authorized Police Search of Privacy Activists Wasn't Told About Tor
#135Let 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.
An ip address is not good enough to locate someone. If they have evidence beyond an ip address sure raid the house, but if they have no identity evidence beyond an ip address then they need to understand they have no identifying evidence. Per this article yesterday, MaxMind(a geolocation ip service) lists a farm in Kansas (selected because it is roughly the midpoint of the US) as it's unknown location as a result it…
An IP address is often more than enough to locate a computer. If it's using an ISP which has an account with an address associated with it where that IP has been provisioned, you can locate a site.
No, you can't identify a suspect or a user. But you can say "I detected child porn at this IP address, this IP address is at this house" and that's more than enough reason to search that house.
Simple geolocation APIs, and using a law enforcement request for an account holder's address are two very different things.
Re: Judge Who Authorized Police Search of Privacy Activists Wasn't Told About Tor
#136The warrant is ridiculous even without the tor part. Read pages #6 and #7. http://www.thestranger.com/images/blogimages/2016/04/08/1460... ISPs maintain hash values of known child porn files? Show me a single ISP in the Seattle area that runs any of its residential customer http traffic through a caching proxy that examines and hashes each file, I'll eat my shoe.
There is so much explaining going on here that it seems like the judge has no understanding of how the internet works. If that's the case, how could the judge be able to give a reasonable response to this affidavit? Seems like a case that requires such a long-winded technical preface could at least be handled by a judge who knows what an IP address is...
It also seems if you were the one asking for a warrant like this, you'd go out of your wait if possible to find this judge.
They could have put stuff in the request about flux capacitors and I bet this judge would have approved.
It is like if you want to litigate patents you go to East Texas.
Re: Judge Who Authorized Police Search of Privacy Activists Wasn't Told About Tor
#137Point of clarification: I know the police are allowed to lie and fudge the truth to suspects and defendant, but is there a legal requirement for them to be forthcoming and truthful to Judges in warrants? Also, tending to agree that even if they had included TOR in the search warrant, the judge would have most likely signed it anyways becasue child porn is a big "must do something" thing, and the technology would have…
It's perjury, but I imagine it'd have to be REALLY blatantly wrong for a DA to go after a cop for that. If they ever would.
Re: Judge Who Authorized Police Search of Privacy Activists Wasn't Told About Tor
#138I'm all for privacy technologies like Tor, but this is one of the risks you assume when you operate an exit node. The alternative would be to give all Tor exit node operators not only legal immunity, but immunity from investigation, for illegal activities originating from any IP address associated with them. Even if the judge and the police were aware of the exit node, it wouldn't have changed the way this was invest…
Suppose I'm AT&T and one of my customers is running a Tor exit node. Do I now have "immunity from investigation, for illegal activities originating from any IP address associated with them"? I can certainly use a router spoof my customer's IP address for any connections I want to use for illegal activity. Then the IP address will trace back to that customer, which is a Tor exit node, and the police can't investigate…
>Suppose I'm AT&T
ISPs have a specific set of statutes that grant them immunity as long as they comply with certain requirements [1]. Individual users do not.
Re: Judge Who Authorized Police Search of Privacy Activists Wasn't Told About Tor
#139The warrant is ridiculous even without the tor part. Read pages #6 and #7. http://www.thestranger.com/images/blogimages/2016/04/08/1460... ISPs maintain hash values of known child porn files? Show me a single ISP in the Seattle area that runs any of its residential customer http traffic through a caching proxy that examines and hashes each file, I'll eat my shoe.
Apparently, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children provides ISPs with a hash database of known illegal images [1]. ISPs are then required by statute to notify the government when images with matching hashes cross their network [2]. [1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2258C [2] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2258A
I know the hashes exist, but they're not used on traffic in transit except in very unusual circumstances. They're used by web hosting companies/dedicated server providers/VPS hosting companies etc to examine the disk/storage device contents of a suspicious server against a known list of the hashes of previously-seized CP.
Re: Judge Who Authorized Police Search of Privacy Activists Wasn't Told About Tor
#140The warrant is ridiculous even without the tor part. Read pages #6 and #7. http://www.thestranger.com/images/blogimages/2016/04/08/1460... ISPs maintain hash values of known child porn files? Show me a single ISP in the Seattle area that runs any of its residential customer http traffic through a caching proxy that examines and hashes each file, I'll eat my shoe.
Apparently, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children provides ISPs with a hash database of known illegal images [1]. ISPs are then required by statute to notify the government when images with matching hashes cross their network [2]. [1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2258C [2] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2258A
All you have to do is get access to that DB and then you have A1 blackmail material, ready to bury any enemy of yours, specially in America, specially if they have/deal-with children.