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The dangers of operating a Tor exit node

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Re: The dangers of operating a Tor exit node

#21

Post by ciupicri »

josefresco wrote: post #14
mikedouglas wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where did the process screw up here? Regardless whether he was running a Tor server or not, you don't think that the link between his IP address and child pornography was enough to warrant a search?

I would think that the Police, or a judge in particular (who allows this warrant) would require at least one more piece of cooberating evidence before 'breaking someone's door down'.

Like what? The thing is, if he was a real paedophile they would have needed to act fast before other harm was done and before he would destroy any evidence. The part that sucks the most in this story is the period of time for which his computer was seized. It was absurd to seize his computer for 4 months.

Re: The dangers of operating a Tor exit node

#22

Post by bprater »

cstejerean wrote: post #7

What I'd like to see is a way to enforce restrictions on the destinations you're willing to route as an exit node. I'm all for giving people living under restrictive regimes access to things like Wikipedia, but I don't particularly care to enable anonymous access to child pornography.

Yeah, it's pretty disheartening that a guy who really was trying to do something good for folks who have restricted legal access to the Internet, is hammered by the cops because of some douche-rocket that needed his pedophilia fix.

In his case, maybe white-listing would have been a good idea. I don't know what a Tor directory looks like, but perhaps there could be a list of Tor nodes that give access to specific sets of sites.

Re: The dangers of operating a Tor exit node

#23

Post by bprater »

How do the police even stumble on the fact that this guy was involved?

Did they take down a pedophilia source and then rip through the web server logs? (That seems legit.)

Or were they monitoring IP traffic on a larger scale, knew of a pedophilia source, let it continue running and simply harvested IP addresses that were connecting with it? (Sounds like a privacy issue.)

Regardless -- how does a good guy help without putting himself in legal hot water?

Re: The dangers of operating a Tor exit node

#25

Post by ygcfububyuf »

stcredzero wrote: post #19
mikedouglas wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where did the process screw up here? Regardless whether he was running a Tor server or not, you don't think that the link between his IP address and child pornography was enough to warrant a search?

This has always been inherent in "the process." It's just that child pornography is particularly easy to vilify, as it likely should be. But in the past, there have been similar scares using witches, communists, homosexuals. Now there are Nazis and child pornographers. (Heck, I've even seen people trying to vilify Nazi child pornographers!) I think more attention should be placed on the broader issue of Human Traffic…

Remember how we used to laugh about stories that in the USSR all typewriters had to be registered with the police. -Papers please citizen

Re: The dangers of operating a Tor exit node

#26

Post by anamax »

ciupicri wrote: post #21
josefresco wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would think that the Police, or a judge in particular (who allows this warrant) would require at least one more piece of cooberating evidence before 'breaking someone's door down'.

Like what? The thing is, if he was a real paedophile they would have needed to act fast before other harm was done and before he would destroy any evidence. The part that sucks the most in this story is the period of time for which his computer was seized. It was absurd to seize his computer for 4 months.

> Like what? The thing is, if he was a real paedophile they would have needed to act fast before other harm was done and before he would destroy any evidence.

Why would police suspicion of an IP address trigger any knowlege by a miscreant who uses said IP address? (While miscreants who know that they're being watched may do something, surely police can know a potential suspect's IP address and gather additional evidence without tipping him off.)

Re: The dangers of operating a Tor exit node

#27

Post by tlrobinson »

stcredzero wrote: post #18
eli wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, obviously a blacklist wouldn't work, so are you suggesting a whitelist? Seems like that would seriously reduce the usefulness. How would you know what foreign-language dissident news sites to include?

What about the ability to spread out a particular request to many exit nodes? This would probably require the establishment of new formats and protocols. How about image formats with the same sort of information as Bittorrent? (Can someone be prosecuted for downloading a fraction of something?) As mentioned in the Rivest article posted recently, there are also "packaging transforms" that allow one to divide informati…

If the server supports HTTP Range headers you can easily download portions of files. I'm not sure what percentage of servers do, though.

Re: The dangers of operating a Tor exit node

#28

Post by jgfoot »

bprater wrote: post #24

This is the type of article that should be passed out to everyone running an open Wifi network.

Hell yes. I thought of this sort of thing when I read Bruce Schneier's infamous piece about how it's a great idea to keep your wi-fi network open. http://www.wired.com/politics/security/commentary/securityma... Tor exit nodes and open-wifi let other people use your IP address, and for purposes of a search warrant you might as well let them use your name and face.

Re: The dangers of operating a Tor exit node

#29

Post by cookiecaper »

stcredzero wrote: post #18
eli wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, obviously a blacklist wouldn't work, so are you suggesting a whitelist? Seems like that would seriously reduce the usefulness. How would you know what foreign-language dissident news sites to include?

What about the ability to spread out a particular request to many exit nodes? This would probably require the establishment of new formats and protocols. How about image formats with the same sort of information as Bittorrent? (Can someone be prosecuted for downloading a fraction of something?) As mentioned in the Rivest article posted recently, there are also "packaging transforms" that allow one to divide informati…

Look at Freenet.

Re: The dangers of operating a Tor exit node

#30

Post by Rod »

stcredzero wrote: post #20
poutine wrote: post #5

Because of the ignorance of the police you need to be nuts to run a Tor exit node. I don't much see the point in Tor anyhow, you want to be anonymous for some reason just use an unsecured WIFI AP or a proxy in another country, easy enough.

Better yet, a botnet of 3G smartphones. This might be useful enough that some criminal organization might actually buy smartphones in bulk to do this, instead of trying to hack them. (Maybe even manufacture them? These things wouldn't even need input devices and displays.) Pay truckers or bus drivers to carry them around in cities, and program the nodes to periodically shut themselves off. Combine this with a mechani…

Your idea is devilishly cool! I am not qualified to assess whether / how it could be implemented, but I wonder if it would be cost-efficient. Smartphones are not that cheap. A criminal organization would need some serious financial incentives to deploy such a network. In any case, it sounds really neat: an entirely distributed and decentralized. Such a system can't be brought down with a warrant. It can't be beheaded.
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