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Is this is the "big brother" plan to eradicate anonymity services? Just argue "child porn!" and arrest everyone? The law quoted was: >Not only the immediate p

Is this is the "big brother" plan to eradicate anonymity services? Just argue "child porn!" and arrest everyone? The law quoted was: >Not only the immediate perpetator commits a criminal action, but also anyone who appoints someone to carry it out, or anyone who otherwise contributes to the completion of said criminal action. Anyone who contributes? Wouldn't this include ISPs or perhaps even the application server technologies (HTTP, FTP) used? Or clients, browsers and picture viewers? In any case, kudos to this guy. I can't imagine what he's going through: PTSD, having all his hardware taken away, dealing with clueless police.

VMG 12y ago
Assuming Darknet technology is improved to the point that "exit nodes" become unnecessary (something like BitMessage), the next target would be developers of such software and developers of cryptography software in general.
- rainforest 12y ago
  Exit nodes are already unnecessary; TOR allows you to operate services on the network itself ("hidden services"). However, it seems not everything is kept on the TOR network. I would've assumed that if someone were using TOR for criminal purposes, they wouldn't expose themselves to monitoring by accessing resources off TOR, but that doesn't seem to be the case.
giancarlostoro 12y ago
Lawmakers aren't as intelligent as programmers. What's worse is, instead of just telling him to turn off the exit node now he's seen as a criminal by the system for doing absolutely nothing. Imagine applying for a job and trying to explain to them why you were arrested, especially if the interviewer is not tech savvy it might not look so good.
- the_mitsuhiko 12y ago
  > Lawmakers aren't as intelligent as programmers. What's worse is, instead of just telling him to turn off the exit node now he's seen as a criminal by the system for doing absolutely nothing. Imagine applying for a job and trying to explain to them why you were arrested, especially if the interviewer is not tech savvy it might not look so good. He did not receive a criminal record.
  - giancarlostoro 12y ago
    Oh, I must of read it wrong then.
    - jebblue 12y ago
      GRAMMAR: [must have*] not of.
      - heptal 12y ago
        Please do not question the intelligence of programmers.
      - eric_h 12y ago
        strictly speaking, the pronunciation he was going for was must've.
- spyder 12y ago
  From his blog: "It’s now finally over and besides the cost i CAN live with this sentence, it does not show up in police registers and won’t be an issue for work and alike in the future."
malka 12y ago
When someone is condamned for something online-related (piracy, CP, etc.), we should obviously arrest all the owners of routers between the source and the target. They are accomplice because they helped the data to transit. That's only commom sense ! /s
- pbhjpbhj 12y ago
  Just running network equipment doesn't make you aware of it's use though. Tor users know through high-profile cases that Tor is being used for drugs deals and other criminal activities - but they run the exit nodes in the face of this. I'm not saying the law is correct (nor wrong) just that the application appears to be valid. Yes, there are high-moral reasons to run an exit node too.
  - jdjb 12y ago
    ISPs know that the internet is used for drug deals and criminal activities. Should we prosecute them too? Gun dealers also know their guns can be used to shoot people. Are they culpable in every murder?
    - Spooky23 12y ago
      The difference is that ISPs are regulated, and part of that regulation is that they must intercept traffic.
      - schoen 12y ago
        I don't follow this distinction, at least in terms of U.S. law. Every kind of entity can receive orders under the Wiretap Act, whether it's "regulated" or not. My friend who runs the server where I have my e-mail could receive such an order. Until the D.C. Circuit accepted law enforcement's reinterpretation of CALEA in 2006, ISPs were not required to buy or have wiretapping equipment, but they were required to comply with wiretap orders to the best of their ability. Tor node operators are presumably also legally required to comply with wiretap orders to the best of their ability. Does your theory suggest that ISPs' liability would have been different before 2006 because no specific regulation treated them differently from Tor node operators with respect to wiretap obligations then?
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
xbadxapple 12y ago
Unfortunately the mainstream media has taken a stern stance of building a negative image of those services. You always get to read how it's full of pedophiles and drug traffic. The fact that such services help dissident journalists, bloggers or political figures or are invaluable in case of repressive internet shut-down seems to escape their spotlight. This generalization of tech phenomenon which can be used for both good and bad deeds has led to extreme paranoia. Hence such harsh sweeps when dealing with it, I guess. Those who are under the effect of the judgement are also a part of yet another generalization encompassing an undefined, ridiculously big network of "criminals".
- mike_hearn 12y ago
  The general assumption in both the public mind and law is that anonymous == criminal, because of the "if you've got nothing to hide you've got nothing to fear" argument. The long term downward trend in the trustedness of institutions has been steadily undermining this argument which is why, I think, things like Tor exist at all, but public attitudes change slowly. In the case of Tor, it's slower / less convenient than usual browsing and is otherwise the same except for being more anonymous. So it's very easy to plant the idea in people's minds that there's no point in using it unless you're up to no good. And the Tor project doesn't really help here - they talk about the legitimate uses on their website but don't point to concrete examples (iirc), e.g. they say the military use it, but provide no real evidence of that. I think actually the UK child porn censors use it as well because it's a source of free proxies and child porn hosting sites know their IP addresses and block them, which is a pretty funny story, but this was mentioned in some talk and I don't think it's on their website. To make things worse, the internet itself is rapidly converging on the consensus that Tor isn't worth it. Witness the widespread blocking of exit nodes that occurs these days. Tor is losing the argument not just in court but elsewhere too. IMHO running Tor exits will not become less dangerous any time soon unless Tor finds a way to significantly boost "obviously legit" usage. For that they'd need to provide a Tor browser that isn't geared towards the total-anonymity-or-die crowd. VPN services like HotSpot Shield absolutely dominate Tor in terms of usage because they're much easier t use and don't do stuff like disable Flash and constantly wipe cookies, which makes them much more popular for people trying to evade national censorship but not treat the destination service as hostile.
downandout 12y ago
While I disagree with them, there are a multitude of laws in most countries that make operating a TOR exit node a very bad idea. The concept of criminal responsibility for enabling the illegal acts of others, even when you don't know specifically what others are going to do with the tools you provide, is well established in the US and other countries. Perfect example: Ryan Holle of Florida is serving life without parole for allowing his friends to borrow his car at a party when he was 18 years old. He went to sleep; his friends took the car and committed a robbery during which someone was killed. The prosecutor's argument to the jury during the 1 day trial? "No car, no murder".
- cookiecaper 12y ago
  This is why the concept of jury nullification is important. Yes, it's good to have laws that punish accessories, but that kind of thing is obviously not the intended case. No rational person would accept that outcome under normal circumstances, but jurors are essentially bullied by the legal establishment, which holds them in fairly clear disdain, and told they must deliver a ruling based on certain rules without consideration to the larger import of the situation or face contempt of court. I suppose the abuse is even worse in jurisdictions and/or cases where jurors do not have a say in sentencing.
  - hga 12y ago
    After some checking with Google I don't get the impression this case was "serious" enough to have a jury involved. E.g. from the statement of the convicted it's implied the maximum jail term would have been 3 months. Those of us in common law based legal regimes count ourselves lucky to have that check in all but the most trifling of cases.
  - drzaiusapelord 12y ago
    Holle knew they were going to use his car in a robbery. I imagine most juries would still punish even if they knew of nullification. The parent poster mislead you into thinking Holle was ignorant of what the car was used for. I'd convict him considering the circumstances. He is an accomplice.
- 12y ago
ominous 12y ago
"In the end, what got us was not AIDS, social injustice or a stealthy black hole. The second the first artificial intelligence awakened, charged with keeping peace in a college campus, it managed to exploit its way around the globe and waged war on all systems with laws, protocols and contracts. Creating rules allowed for them to be broken. By breaking rules, criminals were created. Rules prescribe punishment. At the same time the intelligence discovered wit, schadenfreude and the concept of "kafkian hell". Everything was enforced at once."
- RadioAndrea 12y ago
  What are you quoting here?
  - ominous 12y ago
    I made that up. The "'s were just to make the text appear to have a context elsewhere.
  - jpd 12y ago
    Not certain, but the writing style is similar to Orwell's 1984.
chrisdevereux 12y ago
I'm no Tor expert so please correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't people trading child porn (etc) most likely be entirely within the onion network anyway and therefore have no need for an exit node?
- MertsA 12y ago
  That's correct, people talk about shady things happening over Tor but how many cases that come up are actually something shady going over an exit node?
  - chrisdevereux 12y ago
    Thinking about it, they're probably quite useful for spam/hacking/extortion.
madaxe_again 12y ago
Yup. Following this logic they have a long trail of people to prosecute, both living and dead. Good luck to them figuring out who to prosecute for inventing spoken and written language, as that aids more crime than anything else. Ban language! And water! And humans! It's a blanket "we'll crush you as we damn well please" law. Most states have them.
Crito 12y ago
> "Anyone who contributes? Wouldn't this include ISPs or perhaps even the application server technologies (HTTP, FTP) used? Or clients, browsers and picture viewers?" People involved in those things will not be targeted, unless the authorities already have another reason to want to target them. Absurdly broad laws, coupled with selective enforcement, allows the authorities to legally harass anyone that they please. Whenever anyone complains about overly broad laws, selective enforcement allows apologists to claim that any objections to those laws are unfounded because in practice people are typically not abused by those laws. However the danger of the laws is not that they will be used to abuse everyone, but rather that they will be used to abuse a select few.

VMG 12y ago

Assuming Darknet technology is improved to the point that "exit nodes" become unnecessary (something like BitMessage), the next target would be developers of such software and developers of cryptography software in general.

rainforest 12y ago
Exit nodes are already unnecessary; TOR allows you to operate services on the network itself ("hidden services"). However, it seems not everything is kept on the TOR network. I would've assumed that if someone were using TOR for criminal purposes, they wouldn't expose themselves to monitoring by accessing resources off TOR, but that doesn't seem to be the case.

giancarlostoro 12y ago

Lawmakers aren't as intelligent as programmers. What's worse is, instead of just telling him to turn off the exit node now he's seen as a criminal by the system for doing absolutely nothing. Imagine applying for a job and trying to explain to them why you were arrested, especially if the interviewer is not tech savvy it might not look so good.

the_mitsuhiko 12y ago
> Lawmakers aren't as intelligent as programmers. What's worse is, instead of just telling him to turn off the exit node now he's seen as a criminal by the system for doing absolutely nothing. Imagine applying for a job and trying to explain to them why you were arrested, especially if the interviewer is not tech savvy it might not look so good. He did not receive a criminal record.
- giancarlostoro 12y ago
  Oh, I must of read it wrong then.
  - jebblue 12y ago
    GRAMMAR: [must have*] not of.
    - heptal 12y ago
      Please do not question the intelligence of programmers.
    - eric_h 12y ago
      strictly speaking, the pronunciation he was going for was must've.
spyder 12y ago
From his blog: "It’s now finally over and besides the cost i CAN live with this sentence, it does not show up in police registers and won’t be an issue for work and alike in the future."

malka 12y ago

When someone is condamned for something online-related (piracy, CP, etc.), we should obviously arrest all the owners of routers between the source and the target. They are accomplice because they helped the data to transit. That's only commom sense ! /s

pbhjpbhj 12y ago
Just running network equipment doesn't make you aware of it's use though. Tor users know through high-profile cases that Tor is being used for drugs deals and other criminal activities - but they run the exit nodes in the face of this. I'm not saying the law is correct (nor wrong) just that the application appears to be valid. Yes, there are high-moral reasons to run an exit node too.
- jdjb 12y ago
  ISPs know that the internet is used for drug deals and criminal activities. Should we prosecute them too? Gun dealers also know their guns can be used to shoot people. Are they culpable in every murder?
  - Spooky23 12y ago
    The difference is that ISPs are regulated, and part of that regulation is that they must intercept traffic.
    - schoen 12y ago
      I don't follow this distinction, at least in terms of U.S. law. Every kind of entity can receive orders under the Wiretap Act, whether it's "regulated" or not. My friend who runs the server where I have my e-mail could receive such an order. Until the D.C. Circuit accepted law enforcement's reinterpretation of CALEA in 2006, ISPs were not required to buy or have wiretapping equipment, but they were required to comply with wiretap orders to the best of their ability. Tor node operators are presumably also legally required to comply with wiretap orders to the best of their ability. Does your theory suggest that ISPs' liability would have been different before 2006 because no specific regulation treated them differently from Tor node operators with respect to wiretap obligations then?

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

xbadxapple 12y ago

Unfortunately the mainstream media has taken a stern stance of building a negative image of those services. You always get to read how it's full of pedophiles and drug traffic. The fact that such services help dissident journalists, bloggers or political figures or are invaluable in case of repressive internet shut-down seems to escape their spotlight. This generalization of tech phenomenon which can be used for both good and bad deeds has led to extreme paranoia. Hence such harsh sweeps when dealing with it, I guess. Those who are under the effect of the judgement are also a part of yet another generalization encompassing an undefined, ridiculously big network of "criminals".

mike_hearn 12y ago
The general assumption in both the public mind and law is that anonymous == criminal, because of the "if you've got nothing to hide you've got nothing to fear" argument. The long term downward trend in the trustedness of institutions has been steadily undermining this argument which is why, I think, things like Tor exist at all, but public attitudes change slowly. In the case of Tor, it's slower / less convenient than usual browsing and is otherwise the same except for being more anonymous. So it's very easy to plant the idea in people's minds that there's no point in using it unless you're up to no good. And the Tor project doesn't really help here - they talk about the legitimate uses on their website but don't point to concrete examples (iirc), e.g. they say the military use it, but provide no real evidence of that. I think actually the UK child porn censors use it as well because it's a source of free proxies and child porn hosting sites know their IP addresses and block them, which is a pretty funny story, but this was mentioned in some talk and I don't think it's on their website. To make things worse, the internet itself is rapidly converging on the consensus that Tor isn't worth it. Witness the widespread blocking of exit nodes that occurs these days. Tor is losing the argument not just in court but elsewhere too. IMHO running Tor exits will not become less dangerous any time soon unless Tor finds a way to significantly boost "obviously legit" usage. For that they'd need to provide a Tor browser that isn't geared towards the total-anonymity-or-die crowd. VPN services like HotSpot Shield absolutely dominate Tor in terms of usage because they're much easier t use and don't do stuff like disable Flash and constantly wipe cookies, which makes them much more popular for people trying to evade national censorship but not treat the destination service as hostile.

downandout 12y ago

While I disagree with them, there are a multitude of laws in most countries that make operating a TOR exit node a very bad idea. The concept of criminal responsibility for enabling the illegal acts of others, even when you don't know specifically what others are going to do with the tools you provide, is well established in the US and other countries. Perfect example: Ryan Holle of Florida is serving life without parole for allowing his friends to borrow his car at a party when he was 18 years old. He went to sleep; his friends took the car and committed a robbery during which someone was killed. The prosecutor's argument to the jury during the 1 day trial? "No car, no murder".

cookiecaper 12y ago
This is why the concept of jury nullification is important. Yes, it's good to have laws that punish accessories, but that kind of thing is obviously not the intended case. No rational person would accept that outcome under normal circumstances, but jurors are essentially bullied by the legal establishment, which holds them in fairly clear disdain, and told they must deliver a ruling based on certain rules without consideration to the larger import of the situation or face contempt of court. I suppose the abuse is even worse in jurisdictions and/or cases where jurors do not have a say in sentencing.
- hga 12y ago
  After some checking with Google I don't get the impression this case was "serious" enough to have a jury involved. E.g. from the statement of the convicted it's implied the maximum jail term would have been 3 months. Those of us in common law based legal regimes count ourselves lucky to have that check in all but the most trifling of cases.
- drzaiusapelord 12y ago
  Holle knew they were going to use his car in a robbery. I imagine most juries would still punish even if they knew of nullification. The parent poster mislead you into thinking Holle was ignorant of what the car was used for. I'd convict him considering the circumstances. He is an accomplice.
12y ago

ominous 12y ago

"In the end, what got us was not AIDS, social injustice or a stealthy black hole. The second the first artificial intelligence awakened, charged with keeping peace in a college campus, it managed to exploit its way around the globe and waged war on all systems with laws, protocols and contracts. Creating rules allowed for them to be broken. By breaking rules, criminals were created. Rules prescribe punishment. At the same time the intelligence discovered wit, schadenfreude and the concept of "kafkian hell". Everything was enforced at once."

RadioAndrea 12y ago
What are you quoting here?
- ominous 12y ago
  I made that up. The "'s were just to make the text appear to have a context elsewhere.
- jpd 12y ago
  Not certain, but the writing style is similar to Orwell's 1984.

chrisdevereux 12y ago

I'm no Tor expert so please correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't people trading child porn (etc) most likely be entirely within the onion network anyway and therefore have no need for an exit node?

MertsA 12y ago
That's correct, people talk about shady things happening over Tor but how many cases that come up are actually something shady going over an exit node?
- chrisdevereux 12y ago
  Thinking about it, they're probably quite useful for spam/hacking/extortion.

madaxe_again 12y ago

Yup. Following this logic they have a long trail of people to prosecute, both living and dead. Good luck to them figuring out who to prosecute for inventing spoken and written language, as that aids more crime than anything else. Ban language! And water! And humans! It's a blanket "we'll crush you as we damn well please" law. Most states have them.

Crito 12y ago

> "Anyone who contributes? Wouldn't this include ISPs or perhaps even the application server technologies (HTTP, FTP) used? Or clients, browsers and picture viewers?" People involved in those things will not be targeted, unless the authorities already have another reason to want to target them. Absurdly broad laws, coupled with selective enforcement, allows the authorities to legally harass anyone that they please. Whenever anyone complains about overly broad laws, selective enforcement allows apologists to claim that any objections to those laws are unfounded because in practice people are typically not abused by those laws. However the danger of the laws is not that they will be used to abuse everyone, but rather that they will be used to abuse a select few.