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.
The absolute balls on the man to continue after being raided. It’s unfortunate that the private internet requires people like him to risk their safety so it can continue to operate.
I always read this is why you run a relay as an individual not an exit. Some one has to run a exit at some point though.
You don’t need an exit node to browse Tor hidden sites. Acting as a relay middle node is also not a problem.
Exit nodes are kind of a “plausible deniability” thing for Tor users from places where using Tor might be frowned upon, but otherwise you can find anything you may want to use Tor for, on hidden sites themselves.
For as much as I’d like to help the Tor network and the idea of free speech, articles like this are why I’d rather let the CIA and other national sponsors take the brunt of running those exit nodes.
But someone somewhere has to be an exit node. Not you, necessarily, in order to browse, but somebody has to be running them. Right?
Tor hidden sites are hosted on Tor nodes, so you don’t leave the Tor network to browse them.
Anyone with a Tor node can host a hidden site, and there are some more or less famous ones around. Some open web sites keep a hidden one as an alternative in case their domain gets taken down or blocked for whatever reason in whatever country.
We oughtta arrest the people who pave roads because human traffickers use them to commit crimes.
The charges usually end up falling onto the last one who can’t stick them onto someone else.
Like, a carrier can blame the ISP, who can blame the VPN, who can check its logs and blame an address owner, who… better keep their own logs capable of identifying someone else if they’re letting random people do random stuff using that address. And a good lawyer, and will and money to fight it.
From the article…
Yes, as they had to give me the minimum sentence. By law they were right as the law only protected registered companies, unlike in Germany for example. The law was changed a few weeks later to include private persons and sole traders as protected lsps, not just companies, but they had to convict me. No choice in the end.
So, ISPs in Austria actually have legal protection from liability here, rightfully so, and also rightfully so, that protection was extended to private persons as well. A rare story of a legal system apparently working well, with regard to the marriage of privacy and technology.
The law was changed a few weeks later to include private persons and sole traders as protected lsps, not just companies, but they had to convict me. No choice in the end.
I am not sure I would consider this “working well”. It is the job of the court to determine if and how to apply law. Laws are never perfect and should be applied per intention, and not word-for-word. If the latter would even be possible, we wouldn’t need judges in the first place, because it would be a “simple” decision tree. But it’s not. And we have judges and the court processes for a reason.
If the law was amended a few weeks later, it shows, IMO, that the intention of the law was different than what was written down. Therefore the judge should have ruled that way by acknowledging that while the law does not exempt private individuals, its intention shows that it clearly should (simply because it doesn’t make much sense otherwise).
In other words: if the system really worked well, the judge would have sentenced (or rather not sentenced) within the intention of the law, and not within the strict writing.
(Worst case is that something like that gets escalated to the highest court who then either also accepts or overrules it.)
Child pornography is in no way acceptable and cannot be rationalized as normal. He got what he had coming to him as far as I am concerned.
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.
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.
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?
This logic holds the ISP and backbone providers liable as well, does it not?
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.
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
The feds in multiple countries have used the tactic of hacking someone’s computer, putting charlie papa content on it, and then using that as a reason for arrest. I’m with you that partaking in it is completely unexcusable and sick, however that fact is why it’s used by governments to gain more control. “Think of the children.”
I have heard of this happening. It is why I have a healthy distrust and dislike of law enforcement. Law enforcement serves the wealthy, powerful, and the interests of the state itself. It is almost like the wealthy have their own paramilitary to do their bidding for them.
Why can’t I downvote this?
I just noticed that lemmy doesn’t have downvotes lol.
It depends on the instance you signed up with. Mine, and it looks like yours, doesn’t have downvotes. It’s the host’s decision. Annoying at times like this, huh?
we should have separate dark web(no CP) and dark web(CP)
Put a CP detector at dark web(no CP) exit nodes and throttle the speed to shit when triggered?
Oh yeah, packet sniffing exit nodes in a privacy oriented network will surely go down well and will have no unforeseen consequences
