9 ms·

Is something like this unexpected? I personally never ever thought so (which is the reason why I never ever even considered running a TOR exit node). As much a

Is something like this unexpected? I personally never ever thought so (which is the reason why I never ever even considered running a TOR exit node). As much as I can respect the idealism about privacy and liberty etc..., I could not ignore the fact that any "really!!!" bad actor could use the same infrastructure to avoid investigation/prosecution, therefore I did not want to provide indirectly any help. > I feel law enforcement realizes this is a big weakness they can target since a lot of Tor exit operators are individuals with not a lot of resources to fight them. They can use the legal system to scare operators into shutting down. On one hand I admit that that might be the case, on the other hand even government organizations/departments/agencies can be "local" and scattered (e.g. similar IT departments for each "canton" in Switzerland) and not have huge amounts of resources/knowledge to track/identify perpetrators of all ongoing (sophisticated?) IT crimes => somebody somewhere might see the same IP involved in a lot of "bad" stuff not realizing it's just a TOR node. I hate the current general trend pushing a position of an either absolute "yes/no" for any theme, including this one (of encryption for privacy/etc vs. crime). In my opinion it's obvious that the current situation of solutions is in general bad: too much pressure on services that provide privacy because it's too easy for crime to misuse them :o(

Sebb767 2y ago
> As much as I can respect the idealism about privacy and liberty etc..., I could not ignore the fact that any "really!!!" bad actor could use the same infrastructure to avoid investigation/prosecution, therefore I did not want to provide indirectly any help. Well, what would be considered a "really!!!" bad actor for some might be a hero for others. Just as an example, depending on which side of the Israel/Palestine conflict you are on, either side using your node for military intelligence might be an use worth fighting for or terrible abuse. In the end, this really comes down to whether you value freedom or state protection more; either of which can be abused by rogue actors or a malicious state, respectively. There is no win-win-solution, unfortunately.
- nkrisc 2y ago
  You have to ask yourself if the good is worth the harm.
  - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
    But the math on that looks like this. The "really bad" people have no conscience. No qualms about compromising the device of some innocent victim and then using that as their "exit node" if Tor wasn't available. So if Tor doesn't exist, that's what they do, and that's worse. Because not only do the bad guys still get to be anonymous, now the owner of the compromised system takes the blame. Which is more likely to be someone less able than you to articulate what happened, and who has to claim they were hacked with perhaps scant evidence rather than being able to point to their IP address on the public list of Tor exit nodes. They also might not be in a country with due process. So what you're doing there isn't helping the bad guys, it's saving some of their innocent victims from being unjustly punished. Meanwhile the "good guys" who use Tor do have a conscience, so they wouldn't do that to an innocent third party, and then without Tor they have nothing. So you'd be helping them too.
    - qsdf38100 2y ago
      We shouldn’t have keys then. Really bad actors are going to force your door anyway. Let’s at least save the doors. Come on, Tor main use is child pornography and drugs. If you think you’re helping oppressed journalists, it’s 99% false. You’re mostly enabling all sorts of criminal activities, from benign to major. Hosting a tor exit nod doesn’t make you a hero, quite the opposite actually.
      - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
        > We shouldn’t have keys then. Really bad actors are going to force your door anyway. Let’s at least save the doors. Locks aren't for the really bad people, who are in fact going to break down the door. They prevent crimes of convenience. But Tor is the lock, and the crimes of convenience would be e.g. mass surveillance of the population, in the event that ordinary people don't have it. So it's not clear what you're arguing here. That everyone should use Tor? > Tor main use is child pornography and drugs. If you think you’re helping oppressed journalists, it’s 99% false. Start here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41507790 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41507790 Add to this, the illegal stuff isn't accessed via exit nodes, which link into the ordinary internet. Those things use hidden services, which are internal to the network and don't use exit nodes. But let's even explore the premise. Suppose a lot of the traffic is people trading in illegal materials. Well, that's not really a big problem; people do that stuff via several other existing channels and the societal cost of each instance of someone buying pot over the internet isn't very high. Whereas the societal benefit of one single whistleblower is massive. These things can change the lives of millions of people. So even if it's 99% contraband, the remaining 1% is ten million times as valuable.
- cm2012 2y ago
  There's enough truly bad actors out there, not everything is shades of gray. Cartels, North Korea, ISIS, etc.
  - lolinder 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - ethbr1 2y ago
      I'm as much of a supporter of encryption as anyone, but I also accept that true effective encryption enables some pretty horrible things. One of those "better look your meat in the eyes, before you murder and eat it" idealism-meets-realism moments. On the whole, though, I think even with perfect encryption the remaining physical traces of illegality are sufficient for law enforcement purposes (granted: if more difficult).
      - lolinder 2y ago
        I don't think the analogies to encryption are fair because a Tor exit node is far more active in shielding criminals than the inventor of a new cryptography scheme is. The inventor merely puts out an idea that can be used for good or bad. The exit node operator is actively paying on an ongoing basis to shuttle CSAM and bomb threats. The exit node operator is also shuttling other content, so it's not wholly evil and on the balance someone might decide it's still worth it, but it's still a much less obvious ethical call than simply designing a piece of tech.
        BlarfMcFlarf 2y ago
        Someone has to pay for distribution, maintenance, and integrations of the encryption on an ongoing basis. If it was legal to write encryption but illegal to distribute it, what would be the difference from a ban? Both tor and cryptography require an ongoing effort to provide their service.
        2y ago
- II2II 2y ago
  > depending on which side of the Israel/Palestine conflict you are on Here's the thing: I am not on either side of that conflict, or likely any other conflict you could use as an example. There are atrocities committed by both sides. There are victims on both sides. You could argue over who committed the worse atrocities or over who is the biggest victim until your face turns blue, it isn't going to end the cycle of violence as long as there are people facilitating that violence. And no, I am not naive. I know there are people out there who care nothing about causes beyond their own self interest and who care nothing about their victims. I realize that these people are impossible to combat without the innocent coming in harms way. Yet the moment we fail to be ashamed of the harm we cause in the name of the cause, the moment we fail to acknowledge who is being harmed in the name of the cause, is the moment we become no better than them.
  - szundi 2y ago
    Oh just because you are not affected yet, you might be in the future, most probably if no one is there to help against people with obscene power and they start to easily win
  - Ferret7446 2y ago
    Here's a better example then. Publishing the truth or publishing opinions about political leaders is illegal in some jurisdictions. Would you be unwilling to provide help to these "bad actors"? Lots of horrible dictators have used rhetoric like yours to rationalize/facilitate their actions. The fact of the matter is, there really is no absolute objective moral compass; and yes, that includes "we should just stop facilitating violence" because you absolutely can be enabling others to take advantage of that to cause more harm. You have to pick a stance and live with the harm that comes out of it (yes, whichever stance you pick, will cause harm).
    - II2II 2y ago
      > Publishing the truth or publishing opinions about political leaders is illegal in some jurisdictions. Would you be unwilling to provide help to these "bad actors"? Realistically, I am unlikely to help since I am unlikely to understand the circumstances and I am especially unlikely to understand who I am aiding. Revolutionaries often look noble (or try to look noble) until they are in power and show their true colours. Operating an exit node is something that I would be unwilling to do since it goes beyond possibly facilitating those who would want to do harm, it is pretty much a guarantee of facilitating those who would do harm. > The fact of the matter is, there really is no absolute objective moral compass; and yes, that includes "we should just stop facilitating violence" because you absolutely can be enabling others to take advantage of that to cause more harm. While I agree that there is no absolute objective moral compass, we each have a moral compass. We have to live by them. Will other people exploit those morals to their advantage. Undoubtedly. That doesn't mean we ignore those morals. Personally, I draw the line at facilitating violence.
- lolinder 2y ago
  > In the end, this really comes down to whether you value freedom or state protection more If we're talking about the decision to actually run an exit node, I disagree with this breakdown of the ethics. I can value freedom more than state protection in the abstract while at the same time not feeling that helping support freedom in Russia and China and Iran is worth the cost of simultaneously helping to shield perpetrators of violence closer to home. In most people's ethical frameworks choosing not to run a Tor node does not make me culpable for the actions of a state suppressing its people, but choosing to run one does make me at least somewhat complicit in shielding the perp of a bomb threat.
  - saikia81 2y ago
    how is this different from running a postal service? would you be against that?
    - lolinder 2y ago
      The USPS has an embedded law enforcement agency [0] whose full time job is to track down people who are using the postal service to commit crimes. Tor is very specifically designed to make an equivalent impossible. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Postal_Inspection_Service https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Postal_Inspect...
- zepearl 2y ago
  > In the end, this really comes down to whether you value freedom or state protection more... This is again a forced binary "and/or"-decision, without anything inbetween. It doesn't have to be like that - both can coexist, if both terms are not extreme. (disclosure: my post is not related in any way to Israel nor Palestine and I'm personally not linked in/directly to anything related to Israel nor Palestine and this post is not related to the current conflict)
- User23 2y ago
  > Just as an example, depending on which side of the Israel/Palestine conflict you are on, either side using your node for military intelligence might be an use worth fighting for or terrible abuse. The problem is when you choose to involve yourself in nation-state conflicts they’re just not going to care about your protestations of neutrality and freedom. They’re just going to see you aiding their enemy.
- tzs 2y ago
  > Well, what would be considered a "really!!!" bad actor for some might be a hero for others. Just as an example, depending on which side of the Israel/Palestine conflict you are on, either side using your node for military intelligence might be an use worth fighting for or terrible abuse. Stepping back though neither side in that conflict needs Tor. They both have numerous supporters in other countries where that support is legal. They can send and receive information through trusted outside supporters including some outside governments. They just need secure communication channels to a few representatives among those supporters rather than something is general as Tor.
- totetsu 2y ago
  >In the end, this really comes down to whether you value freedom or state protection more; either of which can be abused by rogue actors or a malicious state, respectively. There is no win-win-solution, unfortunately. I want to argue for freedom, on the grounds that most people know whats best for themselves better than others, so on balance there should be more people using that freedom for good, but then most people are busy, and not as motivated or knowledgable of how to use that freedom as the malicious actors are.. so is that even freedom in the end?
- Peteragain 2y ago
  During The Troubles bombs were sent via the Royal Mail. Nobody blamed the post office. Indeed any infrastructure is a tool of terrorism as we rely on it (I am not going to make a list for obvious reasons). I think the reason we tolerate this problem with infrastructure is that the benefits outweigh the risk. The question is whether or not the same applies to free speech - you're right there is no win-win solution, but it still might be worth it.
  - blitzar 2y ago
    However if you start "Peters no questions asked hand delivery service, shipping direct from Ireland to London so reliably you can set a timer by it" - and you deliver 3 bombs to politicians you might find yourself being asked a few questions.
    - petertodd 2y ago
      At the time that's exactly what the Royal Mail was. Requiring identification to send packages is a much more recent development. Society just accepted that bad actors could do this and solved the root problem instead.
      - watwut 2y ago
        > Society just accepted that bad actors could do this and solved the root problem instead. You ... do not read much about history, I guess from this.
  - lolinder 2y ago
    > I think the reason we tolerate this problem with infrastructure is that the benefits outweigh the risk. The thing is, we absolutely don't tolerate this with infrastructure. We have entire systems in place to make sure that we can find people who use our infrastructure to kill people. The USPS has its own entire law enforcement branch whose sole job is to track down people who misuse the mail. I'm sure there are processes in the UK for the same. With our infrastructure there's some non-zero amount of abuse that we acknowledge we won't be able to prevent in order to make everything work without infinite enforcement cost, but we don't just close our eyes to the abuse and not even try to do anything about it at all. The difference between the post office and Tor is that Tor is very specifically designed to make tracking a sender of a bomb threat impossible. State-run postal services at least try to have an audit trail for what they send.
- nox101 2y ago
  I don't think that dicotomy is quite right. bad actors can take away my freedoms (for example if they steal my bank account I'm no longer financially free as I'd have no money) I don't know the correct balance. maybe it's just an impossible problem. I just don't think the two sides are freedom vs state protection.
john_the_writer 2y ago
Agreed.. this " I could not ignore the fact that any "really!!!" bad actor could use the same infrastructure to avoid investigation/prosecution," could be dependant on what you personally see as bad actor. Would being gay count? In some countries it's a death sentence, so using TOR is how they avoid being thrown off a roof or stoned. Talking about anything LGB is a crime. What about someone who wants to read 1984.. Would you be okay with them committing that crime?
- zepearl 2y ago
  > I hate the current general trend pushing a position of an either absolute "yes/no" for any theme...
- paperplatter 2y ago
  Yes being gay is illegal in some countries, but those governments don't have the ability to raid a German citizen's home for it.
  - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
    The people who do live in those countries could, however, be using an exit node in Germany. It isn't the exit node operator who chooses who uses it.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
AnthonyMouse 2y ago
> even government organizations/departments/agencies can be "local" and scattered (e.g. similar IT departments for each "canton" in Switzerland) and not have huge amounts of resources/knowledge to track/identify perpetrators of all ongoing (sophisticated?) IT crimes => somebody somewhere might see the same IP involved in a lot of "bad" stuff not realizing it's just a TOR node. Decentralization is not an excuse for negligence. Anyone working in cybercrimes should be aware that Tor exists and of what it is. The list of exit nodes is public. Harassing the operators can only be one of malice or incompetence and neither alternative is excusable.
raverbashing 2y ago
> I hate the current general trend pushing a position of an either absolute "yes/no" for any theme, including this one (of encryption for privacy/etc vs. crime). Exactly Making an analogy, I feel these people are kinda the European ideological equivalents of the "sovereign citizens" in the US (though sure, they're usually more informed) In one way, deeply concerned about very legitimate worries of free speech and privacy. In another way, very naive about what happens in the real world or how legal process works Expectations: "We're helping people fight dictators!11" Reality: 80% malicious usage, 10% "just a prank bro", 5% people with legitimate uses and then the rest
- qsdf38100 2y ago
  Agreed, except, what is especially European about this?
  - raverbashing 2y ago
    The idealism and rose-tinted/"self righteous" view of the world. "Wir schaffen das"
    - qsdf38100 2y ago
      I'm not sure what you mean with this "Wir schaffen das" reference. By attempting to be host refugees, one is committing the fault of being self-righteous?
      - raverbashing 2y ago
        Think of it as a kind of "Hero Syndrome"
raxxorraxor 2y ago
Idealism around privacy and liberty are quite important, otherwise you end up with a worse country and there is a reason for laws to usually grant people these rights. The law failed here and it is a typical problem for Germany, that historically and still today has problems with liberties in general. FUD doesn't mean we should do away with liberty. To say otherwise is naive idealism that requires infallible human actors in security related agencies. That is impossible.
_ph_ 2y ago
And it doesn't need to be a "really bad actor". I have been spammed by someone for years who clearly used a script to target an online service of mine. Always connecting from TOR, so banning an IP or a range wouldn't block that person. This shows how easily TOR can be abused, even for small misdeeds.
spurgu 2y ago
"I won't help building roads because criminals might drive on them" Law enforcement are blaming the road builders, that's what's wrong with the picture.

Sebb767 2y ago

> As much as I can respect the idealism about privacy and liberty etc..., I could not ignore the fact that any "really!!!" bad actor could use the same infrastructure to avoid investigation/prosecution, therefore I did not want to provide indirectly any help. Well, what would be considered a "really!!!" bad actor for some might be a hero for others. Just as an example, depending on which side of the Israel/Palestine conflict you are on, either side using your node for military intelligence might be an use worth fighting for or terrible abuse. In the end, this really comes down to whether you value freedom or state protection more; either of which can be abused by rogue actors or a malicious state, respectively. There is no win-win-solution, unfortunately.

nkrisc 2y ago
You have to ask yourself if the good is worth the harm.
- AnthonyMouse 2y ago
  But the math on that looks like this. The "really bad" people have no conscience. No qualms about compromising the device of some innocent victim and then using that as their "exit node" if Tor wasn't available. So if Tor doesn't exist, that's what they do, and that's worse. Because not only do the bad guys still get to be anonymous, now the owner of the compromised system takes the blame. Which is more likely to be someone less able than you to articulate what happened, and who has to claim they were hacked with perhaps scant evidence rather than being able to point to their IP address on the public list of Tor exit nodes. They also might not be in a country with due process. So what you're doing there isn't helping the bad guys, it's saving some of their innocent victims from being unjustly punished. Meanwhile the "good guys" who use Tor do have a conscience, so they wouldn't do that to an innocent third party, and then without Tor they have nothing. So you'd be helping them too.
  - qsdf38100 2y ago
    We shouldn’t have keys then. Really bad actors are going to force your door anyway. Let’s at least save the doors. Come on, Tor main use is child pornography and drugs. If you think you’re helping oppressed journalists, it’s 99% false. You’re mostly enabling all sorts of criminal activities, from benign to major. Hosting a tor exit nod doesn’t make you a hero, quite the opposite actually.
    - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
      > We shouldn’t have keys then. Really bad actors are going to force your door anyway. Let’s at least save the doors. Locks aren't for the really bad people, who are in fact going to break down the door. They prevent crimes of convenience. But Tor is the lock, and the crimes of convenience would be e.g. mass surveillance of the population, in the event that ordinary people don't have it. So it's not clear what you're arguing here. That everyone should use Tor? > Tor main use is child pornography and drugs. If you think you’re helping oppressed journalists, it’s 99% false. Start here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41507790 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41507790 Add to this, the illegal stuff isn't accessed via exit nodes, which link into the ordinary internet. Those things use hidden services, which are internal to the network and don't use exit nodes. But let's even explore the premise. Suppose a lot of the traffic is people trading in illegal materials. Well, that's not really a big problem; people do that stuff via several other existing channels and the societal cost of each instance of someone buying pot over the internet isn't very high. Whereas the societal benefit of one single whistleblower is massive. These things can change the lives of millions of people. So even if it's 99% contraband, the remaining 1% is ten million times as valuable.
cm2012 2y ago
There's enough truly bad actors out there, not everything is shades of gray. Cartels, North Korea, ISIS, etc.
- lolinder 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - ethbr1 2y ago
    I'm as much of a supporter of encryption as anyone, but I also accept that true effective encryption enables some pretty horrible things. One of those "better look your meat in the eyes, before you murder and eat it" idealism-meets-realism moments. On the whole, though, I think even with perfect encryption the remaining physical traces of illegality are sufficient for law enforcement purposes (granted: if more difficult).
    - lolinder 2y ago
      I don't think the analogies to encryption are fair because a Tor exit node is far more active in shielding criminals than the inventor of a new cryptography scheme is. The inventor merely puts out an idea that can be used for good or bad. The exit node operator is actively paying on an ongoing basis to shuttle CSAM and bomb threats. The exit node operator is also shuttling other content, so it's not wholly evil and on the balance someone might decide it's still worth it, but it's still a much less obvious ethical call than simply designing a piece of tech.
      - BlarfMcFlarf 2y ago
        Someone has to pay for distribution, maintenance, and integrations of the encryption on an ongoing basis. If it was legal to write encryption but illegal to distribute it, what would be the difference from a ban? Both tor and cryptography require an ongoing effort to provide their service.
        2y ago
II2II 2y ago
> depending on which side of the Israel/Palestine conflict you are on Here's the thing: I am not on either side of that conflict, or likely any other conflict you could use as an example. There are atrocities committed by both sides. There are victims on both sides. You could argue over who committed the worse atrocities or over who is the biggest victim until your face turns blue, it isn't going to end the cycle of violence as long as there are people facilitating that violence. And no, I am not naive. I know there are people out there who care nothing about causes beyond their own self interest and who care nothing about their victims. I realize that these people are impossible to combat without the innocent coming in harms way. Yet the moment we fail to be ashamed of the harm we cause in the name of the cause, the moment we fail to acknowledge who is being harmed in the name of the cause, is the moment we become no better than them.
- szundi 2y ago
  Oh just because you are not affected yet, you might be in the future, most probably if no one is there to help against people with obscene power and they start to easily win
- Ferret7446 2y ago
  Here's a better example then. Publishing the truth or publishing opinions about political leaders is illegal in some jurisdictions. Would you be unwilling to provide help to these "bad actors"? Lots of horrible dictators have used rhetoric like yours to rationalize/facilitate their actions. The fact of the matter is, there really is no absolute objective moral compass; and yes, that includes "we should just stop facilitating violence" because you absolutely can be enabling others to take advantage of that to cause more harm. You have to pick a stance and live with the harm that comes out of it (yes, whichever stance you pick, will cause harm).
  - II2II 2y ago
    > Publishing the truth or publishing opinions about political leaders is illegal in some jurisdictions. Would you be unwilling to provide help to these "bad actors"? Realistically, I am unlikely to help since I am unlikely to understand the circumstances and I am especially unlikely to understand who I am aiding. Revolutionaries often look noble (or try to look noble) until they are in power and show their true colours. Operating an exit node is something that I would be unwilling to do since it goes beyond possibly facilitating those who would want to do harm, it is pretty much a guarantee of facilitating those who would do harm. > The fact of the matter is, there really is no absolute objective moral compass; and yes, that includes "we should just stop facilitating violence" because you absolutely can be enabling others to take advantage of that to cause more harm. While I agree that there is no absolute objective moral compass, we each have a moral compass. We have to live by them. Will other people exploit those morals to their advantage. Undoubtedly. That doesn't mean we ignore those morals. Personally, I draw the line at facilitating violence.
lolinder 2y ago
> In the end, this really comes down to whether you value freedom or state protection more If we're talking about the decision to actually run an exit node, I disagree with this breakdown of the ethics. I can value freedom more than state protection in the abstract while at the same time not feeling that helping support freedom in Russia and China and Iran is worth the cost of simultaneously helping to shield perpetrators of violence closer to home. In most people's ethical frameworks choosing not to run a Tor node does not make me culpable for the actions of a state suppressing its people, but choosing to run one does make me at least somewhat complicit in shielding the perp of a bomb threat.
- saikia81 2y ago
  how is this different from running a postal service? would you be against that?
  - lolinder 2y ago
    The USPS has an embedded law enforcement agency [0] whose full time job is to track down people who are using the postal service to commit crimes. Tor is very specifically designed to make an equivalent impossible. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Postal_Inspection_Service https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Postal_Inspect...
zepearl 2y ago
> In the end, this really comes down to whether you value freedom or state protection more... This is again a forced binary "and/or"-decision, without anything inbetween. It doesn't have to be like that - both can coexist, if both terms are not extreme. (disclosure: my post is not related in any way to Israel nor Palestine and I'm personally not linked in/directly to anything related to Israel nor Palestine and this post is not related to the current conflict)
User23 2y ago
> Just as an example, depending on which side of the Israel/Palestine conflict you are on, either side using your node for military intelligence might be an use worth fighting for or terrible abuse. The problem is when you choose to involve yourself in nation-state conflicts they’re just not going to care about your protestations of neutrality and freedom. They’re just going to see you aiding their enemy.
tzs 2y ago
> Well, what would be considered a "really!!!" bad actor for some might be a hero for others. Just as an example, depending on which side of the Israel/Palestine conflict you are on, either side using your node for military intelligence might be an use worth fighting for or terrible abuse. Stepping back though neither side in that conflict needs Tor. They both have numerous supporters in other countries where that support is legal. They can send and receive information through trusted outside supporters including some outside governments. They just need secure communication channels to a few representatives among those supporters rather than something is general as Tor.
totetsu 2y ago
>In the end, this really comes down to whether you value freedom or state protection more; either of which can be abused by rogue actors or a malicious state, respectively. There is no win-win-solution, unfortunately. I want to argue for freedom, on the grounds that most people know whats best for themselves better than others, so on balance there should be more people using that freedom for good, but then most people are busy, and not as motivated or knowledgable of how to use that freedom as the malicious actors are.. so is that even freedom in the end?
Peteragain 2y ago
During The Troubles bombs were sent via the Royal Mail. Nobody blamed the post office. Indeed any infrastructure is a tool of terrorism as we rely on it (I am not going to make a list for obvious reasons). I think the reason we tolerate this problem with infrastructure is that the benefits outweigh the risk. The question is whether or not the same applies to free speech - you're right there is no win-win solution, but it still might be worth it.
- blitzar 2y ago
  However if you start "Peters no questions asked hand delivery service, shipping direct from Ireland to London so reliably you can set a timer by it" - and you deliver 3 bombs to politicians you might find yourself being asked a few questions.
  - petertodd 2y ago
    At the time that's exactly what the Royal Mail was. Requiring identification to send packages is a much more recent development. Society just accepted that bad actors could do this and solved the root problem instead.
    - watwut 2y ago
      > Society just accepted that bad actors could do this and solved the root problem instead. You ... do not read much about history, I guess from this.
- lolinder 2y ago
  > I think the reason we tolerate this problem with infrastructure is that the benefits outweigh the risk. The thing is, we absolutely don't tolerate this with infrastructure. We have entire systems in place to make sure that we can find people who use our infrastructure to kill people. The USPS has its own entire law enforcement branch whose sole job is to track down people who misuse the mail. I'm sure there are processes in the UK for the same. With our infrastructure there's some non-zero amount of abuse that we acknowledge we won't be able to prevent in order to make everything work without infinite enforcement cost, but we don't just close our eyes to the abuse and not even try to do anything about it at all. The difference between the post office and Tor is that Tor is very specifically designed to make tracking a sender of a bomb threat impossible. State-run postal services at least try to have an audit trail for what they send.
nox101 2y ago
I don't think that dicotomy is quite right. bad actors can take away my freedoms (for example if they steal my bank account I'm no longer financially free as I'd have no money) I don't know the correct balance. maybe it's just an impossible problem. I just don't think the two sides are freedom vs state protection.

john_the_writer 2y ago

Agreed.. this " I could not ignore the fact that any "really!!!" bad actor could use the same infrastructure to avoid investigation/prosecution," could be dependant on what you personally see as bad actor. Would being gay count? In some countries it's a death sentence, so using TOR is how they avoid being thrown off a roof or stoned. Talking about anything LGB is a crime. What about someone who wants to read 1984.. Would you be okay with them committing that crime?

zepearl 2y ago
> I hate the current general trend pushing a position of an either absolute "yes/no" for any theme...
paperplatter 2y ago
Yes being gay is illegal in some countries, but those governments don't have the ability to raid a German citizen's home for it.
- AnthonyMouse 2y ago
  The people who do live in those countries could, however, be using an exit node in Germany. It isn't the exit node operator who chooses who uses it.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]

AnthonyMouse 2y ago

> even government organizations/departments/agencies can be "local" and scattered (e.g. similar IT departments for each "canton" in Switzerland) and not have huge amounts of resources/knowledge to track/identify perpetrators of all ongoing (sophisticated?) IT crimes => somebody somewhere might see the same IP involved in a lot of "bad" stuff not realizing it's just a TOR node. Decentralization is not an excuse for negligence. Anyone working in cybercrimes should be aware that Tor exists and of what it is. The list of exit nodes is public. Harassing the operators can only be one of malice or incompetence and neither alternative is excusable.

raverbashing 2y ago

> I hate the current general trend pushing a position of an either absolute "yes/no" for any theme, including this one (of encryption for privacy/etc vs. crime). Exactly Making an analogy, I feel these people are kinda the European ideological equivalents of the "sovereign citizens" in the US (though sure, they're usually more informed) In one way, deeply concerned about very legitimate worries of free speech and privacy. In another way, very naive about what happens in the real world or how legal process works Expectations: "We're helping people fight dictators!11" Reality: 80% malicious usage, 10% "just a prank bro", 5% people with legitimate uses and then the rest

qsdf38100 2y ago
Agreed, except, what is especially European about this?
- raverbashing 2y ago
  The idealism and rose-tinted/"self righteous" view of the world. "Wir schaffen das"
  - qsdf38100 2y ago
    I'm not sure what you mean with this "Wir schaffen das" reference. By attempting to be host refugees, one is committing the fault of being self-righteous?
    - raverbashing 2y ago
      Think of it as a kind of "Hero Syndrome"

raxxorraxor 2y ago

Idealism around privacy and liberty are quite important, otherwise you end up with a worse country and there is a reason for laws to usually grant people these rights. The law failed here and it is a typical problem for Germany, that historically and still today has problems with liberties in general. FUD doesn't mean we should do away with liberty. To say otherwise is naive idealism that requires infallible human actors in security related agencies. That is impossible.

_ph_ 2y ago

And it doesn't need to be a "really bad actor". I have been spammed by someone for years who clearly used a script to target an online service of mine. Always connecting from TOR, so banning an IP or a range wouldn't block that person. This shows how easily TOR can be abused, even for small misdeeds.

spurgu 2y ago

"I won't help building roads because criminals might drive on them" Law enforcement are blaming the road builders, that's what's wrong with the picture.