Tor exit node operator gets raided by police

&gt; Seattle police spokesman Sean Whitcomb says the department understands how Tor relays work, and they knew Robinson was a Tor host.<p>&gt; &quot;Knowing that, moving in, it doesn&#x27;t automatically preclude the idea that the people running Tor are not also involved in child porn,&quot; Whitcomb says. &quot;It does offer a plausible alibi, but it&#x27;s still something that we need to check out.&quot;<p>&gt; Whitcomb also says Seattle police were &quot;artful&quot; in the way they did the search. Instead of impounding all of Robinson&#x27;s computers, which the warrant would have allowed, they offered to search them on the premises as long as he consented to turning over his passwords. He did, and they let him keep his machines after they scanned them.<p>This is the important part. They didn&#x27;t shut down the exit node. They didn&#x27;t even take away the computer. This sounds bad, but in all honesty, it could have gone at lot worse.

Someone I know (in the UK) was arrested and spent a day in a cell when some criminal postings to Twitter were traced to his Tor exit node.<p>When the police interviewed him and admitted they _knew_ what a Tor exit node was, and that he was unlikely to be responsible for the traffic. But they did want him to know that running a Tor exit node makes their life harder, and would land him in this sort of trouble.<p>(I can&#x27;t remember the exact words he reported, but it was outright intimidation).

&gt; Robinson admits it might be safer, legally, to host the Tor relay on rented space from a commercial Internet service to avoid mingling his personal traffic with Tor, but he says he shouldn&#x27;t have to.<p>It&#x27;d probably be safer still setup a nonprofit group to own and run the exit node(s).

I&#x27;m blown away that someone (obviously so security savvy) would willingly hand over their passwords. There&#x27;s little sense accepting their assurances at face value in potentially serious matters. LE can and will lie pursuant to their duties. I suppose I&#x27;m even more surprised they didn&#x27;t end up impounding all the equipment anyways.

I went to law school at the University of Washington and graduated in 2013 and I actually did a little research about Tor while I was there and we talked to some people fairly high up in Seattle area law enforcement and honestly I&#x27;m surprised at how fast they&#x27;ve come along.<p>At the time, we couldn&#x27;t find anyone who had even heard of Tor (not to say there weren&#x27;t lots of people who were familiar, just that we didn&#x27;t find any of them), let alone thought through the implications of someone running an exit node so I find it interesting that they didn&#x27;t just seize all of his equipment. Based on my experience, I would not have predicted such an &quot;artful&quot; search, to use words from the article, even just a couple years ago.

Thought I&#x27;d leave it here:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.torproject.org&#x2F;running-exit-node" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.torproject.org&#x2F;running-exit-node</a><p>Also, how risky would it be to host an exit node that is HTTPS only?

Someone tell Apple that they can purchase a lot of privacy street cred if they hosted or funded a major TOR hosting initiative.

In his position, I would immediately cease operations after that police software was used on the system. Resume operations only after restoring from a clean backup taken prior to the raid.

Should the police be allowed to do this? I don&#x27;t know. Obviously the line has to be drawn somewhere right? Child pornography isn&#x27;t like narcotics. It isn&#x27;t in any way a victimless crime and I would prefer that the police be able to inhibit its distribution. But then again if they had taken the same actions because someone was purchasing drugs I would be totally opposed. Severity of a crime is subjective, but a the law is still the law no matter how unfair it may seem. My point is that either the police should be allowed to take these actions or they shouldn&#x27;t and the crime in question shouldn&#x27;t really enter the picture. Actions taken based on one type of crime can be fairly easily justified for another. This is why in the US free speech is limited as little as is possible. It&#x27;s a slippery slope. So I think the real question is if you operate a Tor exit node and something illegal passes through it should the police be able to compel you to release the passwords to your servers. I think they probably shouldn&#x27;t. You would be hard pressed to find a Tor node that something illegal hasn&#x27;t passed through. Does that give police carte blanche to access any information on any Tor node they want? Maybe.

I&#x27;m disgusted the detectives carried around child porn even tho it&#x27;s evidence and not only brought it to a potential crime scene but offered to show it to him.<p>Would they bring around cocaine or a gun from another scene? I&#x27;m assuming the police officer is exempt from distributing child porn as long as he&#x27;s accusing of something before showing it.

Why would anybody give up their password &amp; allow the police to work on your computer? Let them take the systems and accept the risk that running a TOR node in this day and age will get you a visit from the police or similar.<p>This guy gave up the password &amp; now doesn&#x27;t trust what they did to his systems. He has to get rid of them now? This is no different if they took his computers away without knowing his passwords.<p>What if this guys was working with the police all along. Now some guy decides to give away his password to the police so they can check his computer? Sounds fucking suspicious to me. I guess they are testing the waters to see if other TOR node exit maintainers are going to do the same.<p>Listen up! Never give your password out. Encrypt your systems &amp; keep them separated if you are running a TOR node. Let them take your systems, because you will have to trash them anyway if you grant them access.

Illegal numbers are my favourite kind of numbers.<p>How many bytes do I need? In the countries that have laws against cartoons, can I make an illegal favicon? Can I design a neural network which generates illegal favicons?<p>More seriously, criminalizing data is a terrible, terrible idea, simply because it provides a backdoor into the justice system.

The german criminal police (in US: FBI) once called me and insisted on a good talk because of something. They finally visited me sensibly at my workplace, dressed up as customers (promised not to tell my coworkers who they really were). Then they told me there had been terror threats for thr Ukraine coming from my TOR server (they knew about Tor...). Bad thing: the terror threat had been some weeks ago and I had reinstalled the server three days before (without Tor) and all logs&#x2F;evidences had been destroyed. Luckily, they believed me and left me after I simply gave them all passwords concerning the case. I have not run a Tor server since then. I support the concept, but it can bring you real trouble.

&gt; At one point, a detective offered to show him the image, but Robinson refused.<p>I can&#x27;t tell if the detective is a moron or just really hoping to induce a pedophile

I&#x27;m not familiar with how Tor works; would it be possible to run an exit node but have it behind a filter to limit the liability?

This is an area where public libraries could take a lead role by running Tor exit nodes.<p>Running an exit node as an individual is going to be a dicey proposition.