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Raided for running a Tor exit - Accepting donations for legal expenses
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Then, please, enlighten me, what purpose did this case serve? How did it contribute to kids being safer, criminals punished, society in general? Sure, William has been destroyed, he got a lot more retribution than just a suspended sentence, but surely this helped make the streets safer for the kids, right?
Mao, keep running your "black boxes" of information and carry on pretending that you're doing it to create a better society, and that there's a rainbow of goodness flowing in and out of them.
You seem delusional... I'm not "hateful" about it, maybe a mixture of amusement and bemusement.
Your ideologies are best kept in the intangible world of the Internet which is where your mindset seems to live. In my opinion
)
care to answer just one question? I will answer yours too
If you're referring to me, it's going in circles from previous comments.
You pick and choose whether the causality of making a conscious choice to run a Tor exit node can be used for good and bad (and illegal) things.
@alexh @texteditor William did not hide the id of the criminal, nor did hide his details or hide him in his house. Let's say, I operate a cafe and offer free wifi to my customers.
A pedophile comes to my cafe, uses my wi-fi with his laptop (that he has cleaned mac address etc.) and do his dirty work.
Then, police finds out that my wifi has been used for illegal activities and they lead me to justice because I covered the pedophile.
This is exactly the same case. In tor networks, that's the point: the administrator does not trace the actions of the users, so, he doesn't have evidence to share with the police. And in William's case, how do the authorities prove that is guilty? With some random phrases in a chat that he claims "yes, tor can be used by pedophiles" and with an anachronistic law that fits in almost every legal human activity to change it to charges against citizens. And you still argue against him.
If you want to disagree with William in his phrases, do it. Say that he is disgusting having these opinions. But, you too know it, probably he do not applause children pornography, but his perspective is just about the technical part of the case: existing of the tor technology and the ability to give internet users full anonymity to all, other users or the authorities. In the bottom line, if William was or supported pedophiles, then, he would like it, too.
The police should have find material in his dozen of computers and hard discs or in the cloud, in his accounts. They didn't, although they tried to find. And when they faild to prove that he is a sort of pedophile himself, what did they do? They stole his equipment, frozen his accounts to paypal and banks and tried to let him with no funds, no support and no way to continue to be a professional in computer sector. Can you people work as server admin or computer technician without your equipment?
Well, Mao, this is not exactly the truth, but the propaganda european and greek media, supported by the Greek corrupted politicians, tried to convert to truth.
As of the real Greek economy, it is a sort of a lie. Big heads in EU wanted Greece in the euro system back in 1999, and the former prime minister coocked the books in cooperation with Germany, using Goldman Sachs, to put us in euro without special conditions (our economy was in early development then and couldn't afford the stability and other rules of being a member or eyro coin) or agreements. Then, they lent us money the first years to produce a fake development of the country, but lead the money where they wanted.
We did the Olympic Games, that crashed our economy and the big German, UK and US companies benefit from the games, doing all the constructions (witch most of them were temporary, expensive and with no future of using after the games). They force us to buy a big spying system (G4I) that costed a bunch of billion euros (!), a system that did never operate!!! And, then, when the world crissis started, a former prime minister elected saying that "money exists" and then, called the IMF for the first time in the european history.
At the time, we had a dept of 120% of gdp (not so bad compared to a lot of western economies) that, after the economic measures that the EU and the IMF imposed us to take, is now 186% of our gdp (!!!) and the unemployes got from 6,5% to a nightmare: 27% (and this is the official, independent organizations saying that the real is over 35%) and 68% in people under 25!
Now they are saying that, with the measures we forced to take, the dept will succeed to get to the 120% of our GDP maybe in 2022. It is the same percent that we had before IMF and EU take our economy to their hands...
During all that, we sell all greek public sector (telecommunication, energy, roads, mines, land, harbors, property, water) to foreigners and big corporation for peanuts, and kill the salaries (they fell about 45% in just 5 years). Independent economists (both in left and right wings of politics) are saying that this catastrophic results has never be seeing in a country, maybe except the WW2...
It is a big conversation, would be please to do in in another thread or in private... As of Romania, "we are boiling in the same cauldron", as an old greek motto says.
I do not really understand what you mean here, this thread is about a specific case and asked specific questions about the case at hand. I do not deny there are people running various servers just to hide their own illegal stuff, yet in this case except from some marijuana which cannot be acquired through Tor, the police found nothing.
If you are saying some things can be used for good and bad purposes, fine, that is understandable and I gave myself many examples, however, you need to punish the people that use them for bad things, not all the users or makers of such things. Prosecution should have proven there was actual harm involved and it could have not happened if William or someone else did not run that Exit node or it would have been significantly harder for it to happen or the perpetrator would have been caught for sure. This is how justice works.
Tor by its very reason for being leaves very little in the form of evidence as to who is performing requests over the network. I hate to re-spell that out, but that's what it is.
This means it's difficult for authorities to detect crime when it's happening, because of the nature of Tor. Clearly, the authorities, the concept of law, the powers that be (yes, you don't like any of them) feel that something needs to change. They have targeted someone who publicly announced they want to participate in a network that facilitates this. He is being made an example of. It might not be "fair" outcome on him but it seems like it's a fight he wanted to undertake, surely. He seems like a smart guy, so I'll assume that's the case.
Real world examples like "committing a crime in an Internet cafe" aren't analogous for a number of reasons, I think. Witnesses, cameras, fingerprints... the fact that if someone committed a crime in the past hour means that they're physically still in the area.
Tor gives "the good guys" (yes, the people that uphold the rule of law) absolutely toss all to work with. The clincher (for me anyway) is that you have no idea where the requests are coming from. If you're a so called evangelist of freedom of speech, knowing at least the country of origin would help you blacklist "everywhere else" to avoid these situations better, but obviously that makes it unworkable.
Your argument can then turn to "but what about our right to privacy"... and so forth.
Internet world is a world that in may cases can be used to produce theory and the foundation for a better system in real life. In many cases!
Globalization (like this conversation in a tech site!) works better than real life.
GPL and other simila licenses are an excellent example for a new economy system: cheap products and real work on them (take the base for free, use it and develop it further to fit your business needs but throw again the development to the community). Freedom of speech (with the good and nos so good impacts there, but it is better than real life).
So, maybe we should take more serious this virtual tool and try to find how a lot of things here could work in real life / politic / economy.
I didn't intend to say he supported pedophiles, as that was not my point; I apologize if I wasn't clear. You asked me to state my personal opinions of OP, but I have none; The only topic I'm concerned with is internet privacy and the law relating to it.
I'm sorry for using scenarios, but it's difficult to describe this situation otherwise. You wouldn't walk up to somebody on the side of the street selling designer-brand sunglasses for $20/pair; I would never say they're guaranteed to be stolen or fake, but that's generally how it turns out.
It's not the intention of promoting crime, but having foresight knowledge into this heavily debated subject should be enough to dictate whether or not something bad may happen. Due to Tor's design, and core functionality, it tends to attract people who use it for the wrong reasons. This is why many service providers disallow clients from running Tor exit nodes on their networks.
It is proved that they are not the good guys always. In most of the cases, they are not the good guys at all. Do you want examples? I'm sure that you are able to find yourself millions of them. So, tor would be a way to keep us from the keepers...
@alexh and this is exactly our difference in opinion. I argue that it is more important to exist a way for anonymity and privacy for very important and ethical actions of the citizens, than shut down or turn into illegal this technology because it can be used for illegal actions (and of course tor can be used for that).
And I say that there are many other ways for those people to perform those illegal actions: they operated even in the 60's or 70's when internet did not exist (at least for the public).
It is the same as stated in a previous comment of mine: you cannot turn knife selling as illegal, because somebody can use it to kill people...
Sure, I get you. It is an extension to our daily life though, not a replacement.
Sure, but I put more faith in what's out in the open than anonymous individuals making up their own arbitrary right and wrongs. Some would say that's what makes our collective society, a general agreement or set of rules. It's far from perfect but it's the best we've got, and managed to make great things like the Internet and mathematics that helps you conceal information. I get a nagging feeling that some people should down tools and head out to live in the country...
Should narcotics be legalized too then? Heroin can easily kill people, but it can also be used for medication, so it should be legal and freely accessible.
The original purpose of knives wasn't to kill people. I'd assume it was to assist in every day life. The average person doesn't use Tor for daily browsing as they seemingly don't have any need to.
And this is the lynchpin to the case and why William lost it, but Mao and jvnadr can't seem to grasp this.
no one said he did, you idiot, stop strawmanning
I never said it is easy, they must do some work for it.
No, because the criminals hide.
Indeed, police must start going after criminals, not people which try to remain anonymous and are helping others keep their correspondence private.
While i agree that justice can set examples at times, he is hardly the material for that. Yes, if they have found some child porn at his home, a few corpses of 6 yo buried in his yard, a bunch of skinny 5 yo in chains in his basement, then, yeah, they could have said, look, this guy used Tor to hide his crimes, this is why we should outlaw privacy, but it is hardly the case. You make examples of that guy which raped his daughters for tens of years and had kids/grandkids with them, he was also austrian, he didnt use Tor, why did they not catch him for 24 years? Maybe because they were after people like william and had no time to actually look for guys like that?
http://gulfnews.com/austrian-man-locked-up-daughter-in-basement-for-24-years-1.50162
Surely this is in jest? They did not go after William until MONTHS after the node was already down. We received a complaint about a case 14 months after it happened and asked to give evidence. Police is underpaid, crowded and does all it can to convict people for running anonymizing schemes, so they cannot investigate crime in real time.
Indeed, because they are looking in the wrong place, they will never find evidence there, they should work differently, not expect to get IPs and arrest people, but work for their pay. Set up undercover agents, infiltrate, gather evidence, do police work for a change, THEN raid and arrest, not raid first then look for excuses later.
I only argued that this case has no merit and based on that, that it was not meant to protect anyone, just to expose everyone.
No merit based on your understanding of law, which seems to completely ignore the concepts of culpability and liability as if they do not exist
Look, maounique, no one has ever argued that the exit node operator actually took part in child abuse, it's the notion of willingly assisting the transmission of images relating to child porn. Do yourself a favour and stop clouding the issue.
Heroin cannot be used as a medicine, as far as I know. If it can, then, it should be legal with a doctor's prescription (there are a lot of legal drugs that can be sold in a pharmacy with a doctors prescription and not to be sold freely) .
But there is a good example with than: it is proven that cannabis and it's products can heal a lot of diseases or their symptoms: can reduce cancer pain, can reduce long-term pain, can shrink tumors (a lot of big institutes have proven that), can heal rheumatoid, etc. But usage of cannabis in western countries, even for medical reasons, is forbidden!
And a theoretical question: Why is it illegal to use drugs as heroin and cannabis? If I am a user, the only one I can harm is myself. Why don't I have the freedom to chose? And why I do have the freedom to smoke normal cigarets, when it is proven that cannabis cannot harm a human body nor can be dependence for human (you can stop whenever you want it with no effects in your body)? Cigarets are causing cancer and a lot of other diseases.
I do not use drugs nor I support them. I don't like them and I want my head crystal clear (I do not smoke too). But I know that drug trade is the second (after the guns) economic activity in the world, in terms of profit. And this is because it is illegal. (This is a veeery big conversation, we also should not do it in this thread).
Something last: IMHO, this example is not really compatible with this thread's case.
good luck w/ that request, more than likely you'll get an abstract, disjointed analogy to carjacking or something in response
A morally repugnant statement, or a statement which turns out to be ill-judged in hindsight doesn't amount to a crime.
Take this simple scenario - a gang of thieves fallout and one of them decides to testify against the others in court. The other thieves see their lawyer, and in their discussions with the lawyer tells them that if the other guy does not testify, the case will be dropped, so the thieves murder the guy who was going to testify. Does that make the lawyer guilty of aiding or abetting the crime?
What William did was to recommend Tor as a means of hosting stuff anonymously, for whatever purpose, legal or not.
The reference to child pornography was morally reprehensible, but did not equate to facilitating child pornography unless William knew that the person he was speaking to intended to distribute child pornography and use William's servers specifically for the purpose.
Giving general technical advice for some purpose does not amount to encouraging and promoting the purpose it is used for, other than expressing some sympathy for it or not being morally offended or being morally indifferent to it, which is not a crime.
The only crime William seems to have committed here is to express a moral indifference to child pornography, whether as a sign of his personal outlook, or as an attempt to draw out a person he suspected of intending to distribute child pornography. Whether that constitutes an indictable offence under some law somewhere I don't know, but that can only be a thought crime, and in my view indicting for thought crimes is fascist and oppressive. To me it ranks with the law that criminalizes Holocaust denial, but then that is Austrian law too(and German I believe).
I think William has a good case for the verdict to be reversed. I suspect he got convicted because he didn't have enough financial and legal fire power to fight his case. Then again I don't know much about Austrian law
I am not clouding anything, I already rejected that claim long ago, because:
1. Willingly is not coming from any evidence here, he never said "I setup nodes to make it easy for people to pass child porn around" he said he does not care what people do and I agree as that is not his job, he is not a policeman as someone rightfully pointed out, even though he did some voluntary work. I want to =/= I do not care if;
2. He did not assist transmitting anything, in fact, going over Tor hinders transmissions in the sense that it is slower and less reliable as routes and paths change all the time, there is congestion and whatnot, the internet and TCP/IP facilitated if anything. He merely assisted someone in keeping their correspondence private, since police has no idea who that person was, they cannot say he kept them from gathering evidence against him by interfering with their warrant and until they get a warrant they cannot open private correspondence, nor can they be sure it was not just someone who is researching availability of porn over Tor (actually on the internet, because that porn was not on Tor, otherwise the police would have never got the IP) and uses Tor because even researching such a subject can land you in jail in some countries and you know what kind of adds those sites have, you can never know if the add will lead you to a legal or illegal site, hence, the reason of a doubt thing.
Circles. see earlier posts.
You did not reject my arguments, i did present them before, but you just ignored them and went on on unrelated subject such as how bad is child porn and how much it hurts your kids, therefore Tor operators which are not doing police work should rot in jail because some images might pass through their nodes. Not because they are harming any kid or are benefiting from it in any way.
Why does it matter whether the average user uses it on a regular basis or not? It should only matter who DOES use it, not who DOESN'T use it.
If 99% of Tor use is CP and 1% is whistle-blowers/activists/etc who need anonymity for their safety, then I can see why the ruling would come down as it did...nobody in their right mind would run an exit node knowing that 99% of their traffic was going to be to help transmit CP, and anybody that does should face the consequences.
But what if it is 1% CP and 99% activists? Should he still be held responsible for the small amount of bad traffic when there was much more good traffic?
And are there any studies showing what the ratio of "good" to "bad" is? Can any such studies even happen based on the way Tor works? Or is knowing that at least one piece of CP flowed through his exit node enough to find him guilty, even though it's entirely possible that was the one and only piece that ever did and ever would flow through?
(Haven't read the whole thread, sorry if this was discussed already.)
No Mao, as I've said 100 times, realistically an intelligent person would know that there's going to be illegal goings on by running an exit node, illegal goings on that are physically on the device running the node. In case you haven't noticed, I'm not one bit convinced of your way of thinking, and you to mine, so let's leave it at that.
When the arguments go dry, then you start calling words? I didn't say that you claim William is a pedophile. I wrote the opposite. But you wrote that William said "Yes, i recommended Tor to host anything anonymously, including child pornography – Yes, this is of course taken out of context." So, you leave tips for the attitude towards pedophilous.
You can call me whatever you like, I won't throw this conversation it this level. Besides, I took part to this thread because I find it very interesting for the particular case and in theory, too.
I am not trying to convince you, you are a lost cause, I just refute your arguments with logic so impartial people reading here will see why this is not the monster you try to make him look like and that privacy is legal as well as the means to enforce it (encryption, VPN, Tor, Freenet, etc).
And to this argument, I also replied showing why that is invalid because many other things such as the internet (actually, as said above, that porn was not even on Tor, otherwise the police would have not had the IP of the exit node as there is no need to exit the network if the porn is there). So, we are only arguing whether or not he deserves the punishing for helping people enforce their constitutional rights which state private correspondence should not be eavesdropped on unless with a proper warrant knowing privacy is sometimes covering illegal things.
Trolling now. I've stayed impartial as I don't know the OP or his motivations and can only guess yet you imply I'm calling the OP a monster. Desperate last throw of the dice by you.
Just think, if the ideas of multiverses is true, or even the concept of infinity, both are arguments are both valid and invalid... but it's likely that you'll be typing this nonsense in all of them.
Nope, you brought the argument you are looking at this from the perspective a parent which knows he cannot defend his kids from kidnapping because Tor operators facilitate this crime or something along that line. While completely insane theory, it does show you are far from impartial having this fear.