What if the guy had an open Wifi router? And the neighbors downloaded a movie? This goes to show law enforcement does not know what they are doing.
I run a node as well and noticed other (far less severe) downsides of doing so. Registering on certain forums won't work and purchasing games on Steam doesn't work. These parties just blacklist the entire list of IPs published running exit nodes.
Should law enforcement just say "Oh, you have an open Wifi hotspot/you're running a Tor exit node, I guess this is a dead end, thanks for your time"? Investigating (including seizing equipment) to determine whether the traffic in question actually came from the Tor network seems like a reasonable idea. Otherwise, anyone running an exit node would have a blank check to do whatever they'd like and simply claim it was just traffic they were passing through.
I know that people like to pretend otherwise, but as long as there are crossover points between the Tor network and the public internet, there will be non-anonymous people in the real world who will have to deal with things like this. "I'm running a Tor exit node" is not (and should not be) a magical pass that makes you immune to any kind of investigation.
I agree on the general point, and don't think that he should be found guilty if he was just relaying traffic. However, I think that you have to be very careful about analogies like that because there's a wealth of subtleties. I'd like to investigate a couple of them here.
Most of us would probably agree that convicting the post office would be crazy, yet there's an entire continuum of package delivery services including the government postal system, private delivery services like UPS, professional couriers and asking your friend Steve to drop something off on his way home from work. If Steve gets caught delivering a package that contains drugs, his claim of being an unknowing "relayer" would likely be viewed with more suspicion than the same claim coming from a UPS truck driver.
That reasoning makes sense to us because we know how package delivery systems work, and have a vague idea of the probabilities involved. However, Tor is new and niche enough that you can't rely on an arbitrary person (or even a police officer or judge) knowing enough about it to make those same judgments. They don't know whether Tor is more like Steve or the postal service, and it'll take time before that knowledge is assimilated.
Unfortunately, in Germany, someone has already been arrested over using something that works in a similar way to Tor (routing traffic through multiple computers):
The laws need to be changed so that you're not responsible for someone routing something through your PC if you're not aware of what is being routed, and it should be done at the EU level. I hope at least the Pirate Party starts working on pushing for this law.
Where I live you can get punished for stuff people do with your open Wifi network.
I think the authorities know exactly what they doing: they don't want people to anonymously surf the internet, so the prevent it by making it impossible to run Tor nodes or Wifi networks. I don't like it...
Same here. If you don't secure your wifi then you are legally responsible for what people do on your internet which I kind of understand but where does the line get drawn? If my computer gets hijacked and is used in a DDOS attack against some website, am I responsible for that too? At best this is all a legal gray area.
A greyhat should write a virus that hijacks computers and makes them Tor exit nodes. Anyone can run it voluntarily and claim ignorance. And people that get hijacked would have been hijacked by something anyway, so they will at least be supporting free speech with this one.
While I don't totally agree with it, I think the requiring a password on your wifi is not a gray area compared with having a computer virus or a hacked computer. A more comparable analogy would be a hacked Wifi vs a hacked computer - in either case i doubt you'd be liable. That's probably their reasoning in requiring a WiFi password.
I agree with Tichy - I think LE authorities know exactly what they are doing.
If it weren't "think of the children", it would be "al Qaeda was organizing anonymously". They need a reason to create a hostile climate for privacy and anonymity.
Well, here's the thing with that tactic. If I wanted to organize anonymously, I'd have my co-conspirators gather on .onions sites, most likely an address run and known only by us. If anti-TOR shit gets real, then I believe we'll see non-trivial growth of the various darknets out there.
If every tor exit node vanished today, tor's darknet half will thrive and the network would still be valuable. It's trivial to set up a hidden service. If you want to whistle-blow to the media, you'd set up a http or ftp share and drop the .onion URL in the mail to your journalists of choice.
I run a node as well and noticed other (far less severe) downsides of doing so. Registering on certain forums won't work and purchasing games on Steam doesn't work. These parties just blacklist the entire list of IPs published running exit nodes.