"Eric Eoin Marques, 28—the “largest facilitator of child porn on the planet,” according to the FBI".<p>I hope he wins the trial for that reason alone. FBI's thinking is very dangerous here. Basically what they're saying is that if they can't monitor/censor freely the content they want then you're a "facilitator" for whatever crime is happening on the network.<p>If you apply this logic to something else, you'll see how little sense it makes. "If you don't give us your encryption keys, or use PFS, you're a facilitator of terrorism". "If you sell guns, you're a facilitator of gun crime."<p>If you're an ISP that doesn't block sites that we say are piracy sites, you're a facilitator of piracy (an argument that is already used, and was also used in ACTA, too).<p>And I could go on and on about this. People should be calling them out on their BS argument. They're just using these arguments to crack down on anything that has remained remotely private, so they can have the total surveillance state they've always dreamed about.
The big problem with all of this is that despite Tor being a decentralised network, 50% of sites on Tor were centralised in the hands of one provider. For Tor, this is like Amazon EC2 permanently going down. It'll route around the problem and they FBI will have probably stopped a total number of 0 child porn consumers and authors in the process, but it'll be heralded as a success by the FBI because they'll have stopped an individual person from facilitating child porn for a short while by destroying his life and taking out a large amount of legitimate free speech in the form of collateral damage.
I think this are the kind of comments that turn people away from the freedom argument. If Eric Eoin Marques is proven beyond reasonable doubt to be the operator of the freedom hosting and that he knew about the child porn content, he should be responsible for the content.<p>Look at this argument in real world terms. If you are an owner and operator of a motel, and you rent a room to someone who then goes on to rape and kill a girl in that room, you are not responsible for those actions. Even if you made no effort to check the identity of the renter, and accepted cash, you are still innocent, at least morally (legally, depends on the state). However, if you happen to pass by the window of that room, see the occupant killing a girl in that room, you have the moral and legal duty to call the cops.<p>I would never argue that the tor network, the node operators, the exit node operators, or the internet companies used to run the tor traffic would ever in any way be responsible for the child porn. Likewise, the camera manufacturers, and the manufacturers of all the hardware used to store and distribute said child porn would never be liable for that content. But, surely, the guy who rented the infrastructure to the child porn ring operators would be liable, if it can be proven that he knew for a fact that specific clients of his service used it for child porn.<p>Now, the reason I say specific clients is because it's not enough to argue that he knew or should have known that some of his clients used the service for child porn. AT&T knows for a fact that some of their clients use the internet connection AT&T provides for child porn, but no one would argue that AT&T is guilty. But specific knowledge equals guilt in my mind.
So if you are an ISP and have a router in any way used for any kind of networking over internet, you are possibly or most probably facilitator for money laundering, child porn, piracy, terrorism or any kind of online crime that's possible. Or you should have implemented resource expensive deep packet inspection and filtering solutions.
The correlation between the launch of the bank and his arrest is quite suspect.
I believe the hosting was secure however the bank wasn't and it allowed the police to identify him through that.
Once they knew who he was doing the rest was easy.
As usual, it's pretended to be all about 'protecting the children'.
Yet Freedom Hosting sets up an independent, unmonitored bank (Onion Bank), and ONE MONTH LATER gets destroyed.<p>Actually it's all about control of money.<p>Anyone who thinks the government, FBI, etc gives a damn about 'safety of the children' is hopelessly naive. And is exactly the kind of person who'll be fooled when the government _says_ they are 'doing it for the children'.<p>This is the same government that has bought 1.6 billion rounds of hollow point ammunition (and is buying more), and also forces ever-increasing numbers or ever more toxic immunization shots on infants. While denying the Autism and auto-immune disease epidemics have anything do do with inoculations. Oh, and also cheerfully fired hundreds of tons of depleted uranium munitions into Irag and Bosnia, resulting in vast suffering of countless deformed children, for thousands of coming generations.<p>Gaol Marques and shut down Freedom Hosting to "protect the children"?<p>Bullsh*t.