Here is something else to consider : Why will just about any ISP shut down a customer with an open mail relay? It allows anonymous access to anyone trying to send an email, right. So why would this not be considered just as "free speech" as the Tor server. The reason I believe is because we as an industry decided that spam was a "bad thing" before it even became illegal. In the case of Tor, it largely enables anonymous transfer of data (like copyrighted bit torrent traffic) including some content that is blatently illegal to even possess. As a community we have been a lot less decisive about that subject. Before we chastise the legal process being used by the government just consider everything we do as service providers under the guise of "acceptable use" which has just about no basis in the law. Most "acceptable use" violations are basically doing stuff we don't like. As far as the Internet just being a tool, I agree but there are and always have been laws to govern the use of tools whether we are talking about telephones, guns, postal system, or any other tool. Conducting the alleged business over the telephone would be a crime just as sending it through the postal system. If you were encrypting voice calls for the sole purpose of avoiding a legal wiretap I think the law might have a problem with that. If you were to provide that service to someone like a kidnapper or the mafia, I bet you are going to have some tough questions thrown at you. As I see it, here are the possible reasons this individual set up this Tor network : 1. This man is truly the saint of the Internet privacy community and he spent his own hard earned money to set up a bunch of off shore Tor servers for the benefit of mankind. Why he needs exit nodes in the United States and Poland I am not sure about. Is the German government cracking down a lot on dissident traffic coming out of servers in his own country? He must not be able to pay his own legal expenses because he is too busy building servers for the good of humanity. 2. This guy was using Tor for whatever personal reasons. Could be that there were not enough exit nodes to get the kind of performance he wanted. Maybe he was downloading / uploading various content, legal or illegal and was serious enough about it that he set up exit nodes in multiple countries. That might explain the ton of storage he had at his residence. Maybe he has a big recipe collection, pirated movie collection, or unspeakable content the police are looking at now. The content will say if he is innocent or guilty. Maybe he was using it for one thing and others were using it for something else. In that case, my thoughts are if you swim with sharks you might get bit. 3. Maybe this guy was running a Tor network as a paid service for others not wanting to get caught doing whatever they were doing. Could be a lucrative business for an enterprising system admin I suppose. You would not want to set up these servers at your own workplace right, and maybe you have customers in multiple countries. Who might want a covert communications network? Drug cartels, media pirates, intelligence agencies, terrorists, illegal child porn producers, whoever does not want to get caught communicating. Maybe even downtrodden dissidents but they likely don't have a lot of money. He is going to need your money to defend himself because the government will gets suspicious if he shows up with another safe deposit box of cash and his customer certainly can't be contacted to help. I see these possible outcomes : 1. The guy has nothing on his home computers or the Tor server that point to a crime and he gets his stuff back. Inconvenient no doubt but he won't need that legal defense fund. 2. Maybe this guy is as serious about his home gear as his network privacy. Maybe everything at home is deep encrypted. Unlikely it will be secure enough but maybe the government has its suspicions but cannot make the case and they drop it. 2. The guy has tons of illegal content on his home storage stuff and gets nailed for it. That legal defense fund is going to be paying the SPA, RIAA, or whoever else is going to sue him. If it what the police allege then he is going away for quite awhile. 3. The guy is innocent but gets found guilty because "the man" just does not like Tor. Your legal defense fund probably won't help much because if "the man" wants him locked up with no evidence then your defense probably won't help a lot. You will be better off selling "Free Mother Tor-esa" T-shirt to try to get him sprung. I might be a cynic but I am just not thinking it is #1 on these lists. Steven Naslund -----Original Message----- From: Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu [mailto:Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu] Sent: Tuesday, December 04, 2012 1:36 PM To: Brian Johnson Cc: nanog@nanog.org Subject: Re: William was raided for running a Tor exit node. Please help if On Tue, 04 Dec 2012 17:32:01 +0000, Brian Johnson said:
This is a misleading statement. ISP's (Common carriers) do not provide
a knowingly illegal offering, ... TOR exit/entrance nodes provide only the former.
This is also a misleading statement. Explain the difference between a consumer ISP selling you a cable Internet plan knowing that NN% of the traffic will be data with questionable copyright status, and 1 of of 5 or so will be a botted box doing other illegal stuff, and a TOR node providing transit knowing that NN% will be similarly questionable etc etc etc. In other words, if TOR exit nodes provide a "knowingly illegal offering", then Comcast is doing exactly the same thing... (Also, feel free to cite actual statute or case law that says TOR is by *definition* or finding of fact, a "knowingly illegal offering" in and of itself - distinct from what uses the user thereof may do with it. Absent that, it's not a "knowingly illegal offering" the same way that some sites have ended up in court for contributory copyright infringement.)