Without incontrovertible proof that these lists are not just "connections" but "engaged in true data exchange with us, in which we verified that the data they s

Without incontrovertible proof that these lists are not just "connections" but "engaged in true data exchange with us, in which we verified that the data they sent us was indeed part of the torrent in question", I'm having a harder time seeing that. Connecting to a torrent is in itself not illegal (if it were, legal torrents such as that used for software delivery would be impossible).