New on LowEndTalk? Please Register and read our Community Rules.
All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
Raided for running a Tor exit - Accepting donations for legal expenses
This discussion has been closed.
Comments
I get the context fine, "guilty by association" sounds too stand-offish for me. Do people set up nodes to expand the Tor network and think a rainbow of goodness is flowing in and out the node? Bottom line is a crime was committed and this 'landmark' case has decided that in Austria at least, providing the means to download child pornography (and facilitating it by hiding the perpetrator) is illegal.
Who knows, the decision may get overturned, and it may be the case that you are 'right' in the eyes of Austrian law.
There are arguments for and against this 'hiding' of data across a network. As a parent it 'feels' right that there's accountability in being part of the network. Like I said before, you'd be naive to think there isn't dodgy things being run through Tor. Naivety isn't an argument in court. The rule of law has accountability. The Snowden stuff wouldn't be a "scandal" if it weren't for the rule of law, right?
IMO it's fine to argue specifics but just being able to unconditionally transmit or retransmit information of any kind "because it's your right" is a joke. I'm sure some people who advocate this are some of the first people to go running to the police when their house is broken into, or they're asssaulted, somehow forgetting that their own application of law is flimsy at best.
Go and ask that to a Chinese, please.
As a parent you are obligated to educate and protect your children. Not lose time infringing on people's rights because you THINK it may keep you kid a bit safer.
Educate my child. As in "don't get abducted and get subjected to child abuse?". lol. ridiculous.
I've held back but TBH, I think the free speech advocates tend to be people stuck behind a computer that don't live in the real world. A real world where there's a market for human trafficking and the peddling of kiddie porn.
As long as you retain your right to read the BBC news in China, it's all good. If you're a conduit to it you're a champion of free speech, and if you're a conduit for kiddie porn, you're a champion of free speech.
Tor is a method for the fringes of society to download Manga porn, download copyrighted material and use the physical network and knowledge that society built to ... bitch about society. Keyboard warriors, idealists and organised crime in one happy rainbow network.
The ideals in your head don't translate into real world practicality.
/troll
One of the basic things is dont talk to strangers. Then another good thing is to divest police from keeping tabs on citizens and concentrate in actually fighting crime. Another good thing would be to stop thinking that people downloading child porn are also producing it. The only ones that contribute to the problem (besides the actual abusers and producers) are those that pay for it. That is extremely easy to track and find them, not only by following the trail of the money, but also by setting up honeypots, same as they are doing now.
Policing is not wiretapping and digging up dirt on people which the regime does not like or those that can be blackmailed later, policing is infiltrating the rings, gathering data and arresting all the people involved. This is how it is done.
Do you really think anyone is abducting kids online? Do you think that education cannot help when kids are using cams unproperly, when they fall prey online to predators? Do you think there is no way to keep them off computers and off the dangerous areas? Do you think it is the police business to supervise your kid online or in any other place as well as all the people they come into contact with? Do you think you can censor the press and forbid adult stuff as well as stopping prostitution? And, if you do think that is possible, as well as controlling tightly the internet, wouldnt be simpler to control the kids themselves?
No, because controlling the kids would be something you have to do, while being a keyboard warrior and name calling to people which value their privacy democracy and ultimately human rights is much easier, as well as supporting the police state. It is so much easier that others will take over our responsibilities and we will simply obey and live a life without having to face our failures and impotence, just blame it on "the bad people" and crawl back in our cave. If that does not work and you will be picked up for some random reason (a govenrment guy in your neighborhood wants to take over your house and loses you in the prison bureaucracy or some policeman thought you are looking to him in a bad way, a local mafia boss in league with the police wants your wife), it will still be "the bad state" of which you are too little to take on. Bad luck, this life of misery is a given, god puts us to test, we will await the kingdom come...
Wrong, that is your own making, your own creation, the police state will not care for you or your kid, unless the policeman also likes little boys or girls, but he is the good guy, part of the system that protects you from evil and nobody will ever lift a finger to protect you, because there wont be anyone able to do so.
Your comments are a million miles from anything on-topic. I only mentioned being a parent as frame of reference so that maybe you could be empathetic to another point of view. Some children aren't fortunate enough to have parents that are able to take care of them, some children don't have parents. This fact is true: there is human trafficking and an element of it involves sexual abuse. There is a "market" for it. It's illegal, morally wrong and it's not anyone's right to abuse children.
All this stuff about me thinking the state should take care of my children is just way off base.
Frankly, your opinion that free speech is above everything else is a little unhealthy.
I wonder if Martin Luther King would have chosen to be anonymous online to champion his cause? At least the OP was forthright in their belief's and advertised they run exit nodes. People call this "standing by their beliefs". I can't fault them for doing it, I'd just hope that they were aware this scenario could have happened.
They're looking for donations to contribute towards arguing their case in court. Have you donated to it yet?
Tor is part of the internet, tor gets abused (as does the internet), deal with it. If there wouldn't be Tor, there would be something else. Tor is not the problem. Back in the days the church was the no. 1 entity of child rape.
Lets start from point A, as always the money:
Yes, this is correct. Back then i sold them (entirely) for around 5000EUR via Virwox and BTC24.
For clarification: My lawyer costs 250EUR / hour, this 10000EUR total (Paypal+BTC) funded (with tax i paid ignored, else around 30) 40 hours of my lawyer which obviously in such a case is not enough by far. I myself invested more than this in the case.
This might be, HOWEVER the law was on my side - ECG would have sorted this out in a matter of hours. Police actively pursued a way of suing someone that is neither much used nor morally right (in this case a law from 194X intended to execute nazi officers, there is a reason why it is is paragraph 12 and not higher.).
This is a very good comparsion.
Now you can discuss on, i likely won't post here anymore until i have sorted out the legality of what i can give out and what not. Just as info as well - This case is actively supported by the Austrian Piraty Party and many other large Tor and Tor supporting organizations, they would not do this if it would be right/correct. They have received copies of the indictment to verify as well. (And i posted them in German on Twitter.)
You will certainly be up against it, but good luck (or good arguing) nonetheless.
The first day I read about this, sadly, sent by Paypal
And this is EXACTLY on topic. And topic is that someone who had nothing to do with child porn, not producing, not abusing, not buying, not selling, not even having it is a "collateral" victim in a fight which is not actually against child porn, but against anonymity and freedom of speech. You will say I am jumping to conclusions but here are the facts again:
1. No child was harmed by william;
2. He did not benefit from it in any way. Was not even selling advertising on those sites or anywhere else for that matter, he was just providing a LEGAL anonymizing service for free;
3. It did not stop child porn one bit. There are tons of exit nodes elsewhere, I run some too (though not http(s), just secure imap, smtp, pop3, many IM protocols, streaming protocols, etc) and they are still legal, this ruling does not make it illegal, it is just a way to harass people into giving up their rights, no different than kicking out of their jobs those that participate in marches or other protests, which are of the wrong religion, colour or ethnicity. It is not illegal to participate in marches, but you can be jailed for disrupting traffic, for disturbing people, you can be sure there will be one government agent which will put up a complaint he could not sleep so everyone recorded as participants there to be jailed, or hire thugs to go in and throw a petrol bomb so the police can murder or jail all the people. It was legal to march in communism too, just not possible due to those things. Do you think that the fact he is not appealing in a case where he would have easily won in the european courts is some random event? You can be sure they threatened him and profited on his poor mental and financial state to force a plea on him. He probably is not even allowed to disclose it. If they put him in jail, that would have forced him to fight on and they knew they will lose, in this way they obtain what they wanted, chilling effects, fear of exercising your right to privacy, fear of helping others to do so, how do you know it was not a police plot all along? How many other defendants were int he case? In his child porn ring? If he did not produce it, did not have access to one of those abducted kids, he clearly got it from someone else. Police followed him and knew his accomplices before the raid, the raid was just to get the smoking gun and find the proof to lock his ring up for good. How many people are behind bars now? If he was such a dangerous man, why is his free to abuse kids again and if he isnt why was he harassed and is still?
The answer is clear, the police does not like people with rights, especially those that know they have rights, and will do all they can to destroy them as well as protect the society from such dangerous ideas.
Comment of the thread for me, I lol'd
Well, dont judge someone who was in hell.
You don't know that, so yes, you're jumping to conclusions. Getting your warm fuzzies from being a freedom of information advocate is "benefiting". Every conscious decision has a reason behind it, correct?
Anyways, perhaps the publicity of a court case is a best outcome for the "cause" but perhaps not for the individual. This may be how he benefits.
At least there's one person willing to stand for what they believe in. Apparently others are exercising the right to be 'someone' behind 50 Tor nodes telling us all something revolutionary that is supposed to be relevant and authoritative. Hmm.
btw @Maounique, I have a package to send, contents unknown but perhaps illegal, I'll not admit it to you and you can't open it. Can I store it at your house before it gets picked up by the recipient? Could be a gun, body parts, drugs, a birthday present, government secrets or the theory of everything.
If you do accept it and it is illegal, good luck arguing it has nothing to do with you.
Self inflicted.
I do know that. If he would have benefited from it he was in jail.
I wish I had 50, sadly, not even 10, but they do push some traffic, however that is not the only anonymising service out there I a involved with.
But this is irrelevant, I understand you would have liked not to hear different opinions, and maybe you would like to send the police to raid me, who knows, maybe they can find something, and, even if not, teach me a lesson through long harassment and legal cases on taxpayer's money?
Your fight against privacy is praiseworthy as long as it is an honest opinion, however, while I support mine by donating traffic, storage space and teaching people, how do you support your cause? How many foundations to support the victims of the priests did you help, how many detectives did you pay to infiltrate and track child porn rings (easy job for anyone, I think even a policeman could do that), and for the right to know what your priest does, how many hidden surveillance cameras did you install, how many computers from priests did you hijack to track the user's activities? There are priests which are sick excuses for human beings, did you wiretap the confessionals or their houses. install surveillance cameras there? This is how you should fight anonymity, that is the place to search, why are people hiding their confessions? I mean, if the priest knows someone did something illegal, it is his duty to report to the police, if not doing so, he is much more guilty than William because he knew all the details and the person who did it.
I am really sorry for you and all the people like you, but especially for your kids and the society you are building for them.
See that sort of works as an argument, except that @Maounique would be holding it in a private domain, whereas Tor is more public with privacy to the users of the domain. It's like anonymously dropping off a package at a convenience store. If we were to follow the logic like that, then it means that if something illegal was found in that package at the convenience store, the owner of the store would be held responsible for "facilitating illegal activities".
It's not really that. My ideal is more towards transparency, with the caveat that some information does need to stay private. I respect a different point of view, though I simply disagree with yours.
To detour with another boring analogy, Google is quite powerful in that it serves the majority of the world's search queries. That's a lot of power. If it's secret algorithmic methods were public, it'd be ruined by people trying to game the search engine results. So it should remain secret.
I understand what you're getting at but it's not the fact that it's "anonymously dropped off" but the fact someone agreed to be a dropping off point... alongside the idea that there's the potential for the packages to be highly illegal and that common sense should inform you of that.
I'm not saying William is guilty of anything, and the laws are notoriously slow at catching up with new technology... though I do understand the precedent of bringing this to court.
And I do see that privacy is gradually being eroded, online or otherwise. I don't see the progression of the world moving away from that.
Sure, same as the people protesting in the street where a window was broken. Nobody forced them to go out and protest, why did they get involved? When you go to a march you KNOW it can go wrong. Therefore, if you do go, police cracks your head because you were around (might not even be related, just passing by as in many cases) it is self-inflicted because it was none of your business to use your right to protest, or, I mean, come on, didnt you see the crowd coming? why go to buy bread at the corner store EXACTLY then? There is some suspicion, it was self-inflicted.
As for the package, no, it is not like that, because the package will NOT be stored anywhere, it will permanently be in traffic by automated means. Notice automated. II would be like opening my yard so people could cross it from 2 different streets and not keep their IDs, so, if some criminal passes, running from the police or even coming from a bank robbery or going to one, that is not my business, but police business, they can pass too and pursue the criminal, I am not treating the police differently.
And I am completely in agreement with you. Governments should be transparent on what they are doing supposedly for our good. Note the naming, public institutions (government), private citizens. They are called like that for some reason, I wonder if you can help me figure out what that is?
You can decide to protect the right of governments to privacy in the same time with their right to know what private citizens are doing, at least online for now. Even if I do not agree with that point of view, it is your right to express it here, in anonymity.
I'm sincerely confused about the "privacy" TOR provide you.
You cannot anonymously purchase something with it. Any sane seller would prohibit you doing that.
All you can do is browsing the websites or sending mail anonymously. What kind of gain this would give you if you are browsing legit websites and sending legal contented mails?
And you can encrypt your emails by PGP. So you don't even need TOR for that. All left is browsing the websites.
What websites you are browsing that'd require your IP address not being seen?
Maybe I'm too naive but I really can't understand all this privacy bullshit.
That is a really weak argument that seems to contradict one of the laws of thermodynamics!
Can't help you there, I'm a royal subject of the queen. And apparently if I commit a crime, I lose much of my conferred rights.
https://www.torproject.org/about/torusers.html.en
I'm afraid you're wrong here. Unfortunately, § 12 StGB (Austrian criminal law) is some sort of catch-all provision that can be applied against anyone who contributes to an illegal activity in any way, no matter how remotely, how little, even if only passively when at least some risk of a crime being carried out or not being prevented can at be assumed by the average person.
I'ts enough to be negligent and leave your WLAN router unsecured and you may end up as a co-defendent if someone uses it to do something illegal. Or you leave your car unlocked in the street and it gets stolen, then you may also be prosecuted for "enabling and helping" the thief. Just notice someone breaking the window of someone's house while walking down the street without calling the police and you may end up in court as the burglar's passive accomplice because he might have created a bigger damage or gotten away due to your not acting immediately. Take a photo of a policeman who beats someone up at a demonstration from a few meters distance (police don't have visible name tags or numbers here, they are totally anonymous, so it's very difficult to identify transgressors) and you may end up in court for interference with a legal act (even if this specific act was anything but legal). And there are many other examples of very "flexible" use of our laws, including some annoying but harmless animal rights activists who were locked up for several months without proper trial under newly created "anti-terrorism legislation" and only recently been released without any compensation or even an apology because there was absolutely no evidence against them at all, just a few unsubstantiated accusations (due to their legal expenses that won't be refunded they are bancrupted for life anyway, so no need to further harass them with imprisonment). Hence, the only way to operate a TOR exit node in such a legal environment would be if the operator were able to check 100% of the connections going through his system in real time and only allow those of clearly legal nature (which is, of course, neither possible nor compatible with the idea behind such systems and possibly even illegal). There are a few, limited exceptions for the postal service and properly registered and licenced communications providers but if a private person offers data or communication services of any kind, whether paid or for free, whether to specific persons or the general public, he is also automatically co-responsible for the content, even in cases where it's impossible to even be aware of this content, which means that providing such a service is a huge personal risk unless you can absolutely trust the users.
As in most European countries, we don't have case law in Austria so the wording tends to be descriptive, covering as much as possible, rather than overly precise and exhaustive.
https://www.torproject.org/about/torusers.html.en has a few examples. Some are tinfoil hat crazy, others are legitimate uses.
You aren't naive, it really is just bullshit
This is comically whitewashed
If you live in turkey, you will need to learn.
It protects the freedom of speech, the freedom of information. If your government wishes to block twitter, you can always use Tor or another proxy, but the main use is when the government tracks your activity online.
An example, in Romania in communism there was a police state, people were snitching on each other and the police was not responsible for any crimes. Marching or listening to the VoA or BBC was not illegal, but anyone caught was jailed under various reasons made up or sent to the funny farm.
People were listening at home at low volume, even so, you never knew if someone was not a snitch so it was done only with the immediate family.
The same situation is now in China or russia, it is not illegal to organize marches and take part, but people doing this find out they were skipping taxes or are guilty of other things, suddenly lose their jobs which at times are quite serious positions as scientists, artists, etc. The government hacks email accounts, so you would like to connect there from an anonymous IP.
But lets take the case of someone working in the army which knows of some atrocities covered up at high level. You would not like your CO to know you are sending proof about that tot he press for many reasons, first you will be labeled as a traitor and aiding and abating the enemy, second you will be charged with spying or misusing state secrets, because the number of kids killed in a raid should remain a state secret. You do not want even the recipient to know who you are. You may never know who infiltrated the press, actually you do know, but if they do not publish it, just move to the next journalist or find some abroad.
Say, also, you find out of a fraudulent government contract and you send it to the press. If your boss would find out, you will not be only risking your job, but maybe even being "suicided" because he would profit a lot from it as well as the governing party, the only loser would be Joe Public and for this reason, he should be specifically held in the dark. You do NOT want them to know about you.
Privacy helps transparency, it is true that in a way contrary to the way @ricardo wants to be implemented, from the citizen to the state, but from the state to the citizen as I believe it should be in a democracy.
Almost all of them can be achieved by simply using a paid VPN. Except the ones like living in China, etc. But I see lots of people from China are bypassing the GFW by simply using socks proxy or VPN.
Why don't I use a VPN instead of TOR? They are blocking the twitter but they are not making it illegal to view. Besides, if they make it illegal, why wouldn't I just leave the damn country instead of breaking its laws?
Bullshit, it replaces freedom of speech with anonymity. Too bad no one really cares about the opinions of anonymous schlubs on the internet.
And go where? Who will take chinese? Who has enough space? And why you should not be allowed to fight for democracy in your own country?
As for the VPN, do you know who is operating that? What if the chinese government hacks it's database? They can track your payment.
You know you are pretty much dead if they find out you are dissident? When your life depends on it, whom would you trust? Better someone which does not know and cant know in 99.9 % of cases, not to mention cares.
A couple of years ago nobody would have ever believed their government breaks the constitution, now they know, but do not care. You so much deserve your fate