Man Found Guilty of Child Porn, Because He Ran a Tor Exit Node::undefined
They convicted him on “supporting the transfer of underage pornography”, i.e. he ran an exit node that “allowed” the upload of CP to an Austrian image hoster. Apparently, he wasn’t protected because he ran the exit as an individual, not a registered company. Most likely, the Austrian authority checked who uploaded the images, and found his IP address, which became the basis for convicting him. He didn’t have any of the materials because all those stuffs were encrypted in transit.
He mentioned that law that was used to prosecute him was changed a few weeks later to protect individuals as well. He apparently now ran Tor exits under an offshore company.
In summary, from what he said, he just happened to run an unrestricted exit node that some people used to upload CP.
I mean… that is the big issue with things like tor and the decentralized youtube alternative everyone wants.
This is an issue on Lemmy as well, one that very few so far seem to have wisened up to. If you host a server and federate it, your server will pull, store and display the content your users are watching for all to see. So you could be on the hook for distributing illegal material if you don’t preemptively defederate from instances potentially hosting content that is illegal for you to possess.
I mean you could say the same thing about any entity hosting public wifi, but I doubt the local cafe owner has to worry when someone breaks the law on their guest network.
This feels really inconsistent is the main problem.
I mean he’s not. He did literally allow CP to be uploaded. And he literally wasn’t legally protected.
But I personally can’t support anything where “Oh well, I guess I accidentally supported the proliferation of CSAM”.
Does this mean you’re opposed to, say, roads, because they can be used to transport child porn? How about postal services—they’ll even pick it up and deliver it wherever you want!
There are 7,000+ Tor relays, and 2,000+ bridges being run by entities including individuals, orgs, corporations, and most likely governments. (https://metrics.torproject.org/networksize.html) So, the answer is yes, no, and something in between. He himself didn’t say, but the article portrayed him as being an individual who believed in free speech, an activity which Tor does help support.
AFAIK you should never run one on your personal IP
Edit, wasn’t a personal IP. I mistook it when I read his apartment got raided. Advice still stands tho.
There will still be a trail. Even if you’re renting a server. Who’s CC is on file? Unless you want to waste your time buying prepaid visas. And even at that, they could track it to the retailer and find out which CC was used to order that. And even if you went in person, there’s likely video footage. Etc etc etc. It’s incredibly hard to remain hidden nowadays.
He was convicted (and given probation) for supporting the transfer for Child Porn, not for accessing it or creating it.
I read in one of VPS rental service Discord that someone rented a VPS to run tor exit node and HDDs of the server were confiscated without prior notice.
This is insane! It’s like prosecuting a postman for delivering child porn content to a customer.
