William Weber, a LowEndTalk member, was raided by Austrian police in 2012 for operating a Tor exit node that was allegedly used to distribute child pornography. While he was not arrested, many of his computers and devices were confiscated. He was later found guilty of supporting the distribution of child pornography through his Tor exit node, though he claims it was unintentional and he was simply supporting free speech and anonymity. He was given a 5 year probation sentence but left Austria shortly after. Though some articles portray him negatively, it is debatable whether he intentionally supported child pornography distribution or simply operated in the legal grey area of Tor exit nodes.
He wasn’t searching for it or knowingly distributing it. The way Tor exit nodes work is that you’re hosting a machine that lets other people on the Tor network communicate with the internet. You’re essentially routing a portion of the entire network’s traffic through your machine. You can’t really control who is using it or what it transmits at that point.
He got punished because somebody else shared CP, using his equipment to do so. It’s like being jailed for having your car stolen and being used to hit a pedestrian.
Please don’t, the misunderstanding is common, and it just reinforces the point of the rebuttal. I’ve seen sooo many anti CP laws trying to be forced through congress, but most of it is just bullshit surveillance or drm stuff but it gets the support from people like you who (understandably) hear about the propagation of CP and support stopping it via those laws.
It would be better for you to leave the original comment, use markdown to strike it through*, and create an edit showing that you realized it was wrong.
It shows humility and reflects positively on you, but it also allows the history of this conversation to remain preserved.
*not sure if this is possible on Lemmy yet
Edit: it is :)
It’s like being jailed for having your car stolen and being used to hit a pedestrian.
Kind of… only you parked the car in front of a jail, left the door open, keys in the ignition, and a “FREE TO USE” sign next to it.
Hey, maybe the next guy will just use it to go buy some groceries… maybe.
I hate this analogy. Its more like you parked it in a very public space and said “free to use” and someone who had been to jail used it. There are all kinds of legitimate reasons to use TOR that aren’t child porn, and acting like because it can be used to view child porn makes it truly horrible and hosting hardware to use it makes you part of the problem shows a misunderstanding of what its for.
Let me pose it to you this way. Do you use a VPN? Do you know someone who has used a VPN? Have you watched a YouTube video that was sponsored by a VPN? Do you remember the reasons to use a VPN? Those are all things Tor does well. Better even. And for free. Meanwhile, hosting VPN hardware comes with all the same “people could use it to host child porn” downsides as TOR exit nodes
In my personal life, I use Orbot all the time for things like keeping my Syncthing traffic secure and quickly anonymizing my traffic. I also host a relay because Iranian women and Ukrainian soldiers are currently using the Tor network for life and death circumstances.
Its more like you parked it in a very public space and said “free to use” and someone who had been to jail used it.
Iranian women and Ukrainian soldiers
As much as I sympathize and approve of that… try to take a step back and look at it from the side: you’re still saying you do it to help others “break the law”, it’s just someone else’s law that you don’t agree with, and hopefully it doesn’t break the law where you live (stay safe, although running a relay is not the same as running an exit node… but still). My analogy tried to capture that.
BTW, I do use Tor, and may also host a relay or two, but still no exit nodes.
Orbot all the time for things like keeping my Syncthing traffic secure
I thought Syncthing already used encryption with a dual public key system to do the syncing? Is there an extra reason to add Orbot to it?
It’s like being jailed for having your car stolen and being used to hit a pedestrian.
Exactly this, except that nobody stole your car. You are providing free and no-questions-asked open access to your car for any member of the public who needs to use it. Many other people also used the car that day for legitimate business or for fun, but then one guy got in it and ran over 32 people in a furious rampage.
Clearly the driver is at fault here, but a case can be made (and apparently, was) that this would not have been possible had you not provided access to the car to the perp in question.
This logic holds the ISP and backbone providers liable as well, does it not?
Clearly the driver is at fault here, but a case can be made (and apparently, was) that this would not have been possible had you not provided access to the car to the perp in question.
This is the equivalent of holding gun manufacturers culpable if someone buys a gun from them and then uses it to commit murder - right?
Well, if weapons manufacturers were handing the guns out literally for free to anyone who has a pulse, I could definitely see them getting in trouble
Gun manufacturers have special protection, specific legislation at the federal level singling them out to not be liable.
That’s a bit more of a stretch, but barely. It’s in the same spirit, yes.
Please do note that I’m not necessarily agreeing with the ruling here, only trying to draw a more accurate analogy. The problem with equating those two though - the tor node ruling vs gun manufacturers being liable for deaths - fundamentally comes down to a few facts, that guns are sold with the intention of killing people, that guns are sold by corporations with lots of money and power, and that governments don’t want tor in the hands of citizens. Tor node keepers are easy to prosecute in many countries, as individuals hosting software that is frequently used for illegal action. Gun manufacturers are not.
This is the first I’ve heard of it. Why would someone willingly host an exit node when the risks are so high?
Because they believe in what tor represents. It absolutely is used for terrible things, but it is also a pretty critical resource to a lot of people in a lot of dangerous parts of the world where thought crimes get people killed.
But yeah, no way am I running one. The potential costs are way too high.
Because Iranian women deserve to tell their stories. Because Ukrainian soldiers need the most secure relays for their messaging services possible. Because the Chinese government’s great firewall is designed to keep people from seeing reality. Because Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, and Google want to control the future of the web, and that future includes willing participation in incomplete police action that gets minorities and people of color killed. Because control of your personal identity is a matter of grand security when it comes to preventing the most successful kinds of attacks: social engineering. Because all of these things can either be accomplished with a paid VPN owned by a corporation who might ALSO be complicit in all of the problems above, or they can be acheived on donated computing time, and be more effective in their application.
Child porn happens on the internet. I don’t see anyone clamoring to shut down the whole thing. So which do you want? To destroy every single tool that can be used to acquire it, or to foster a more fact and policy based government that performs root cause analyses and works to make a better society rather than doling out punishment and asking quearions later
