[tor-relays] case law on for exit nodes

[andrew at torproject.is]

On Wed, May 23, 2012 at 07:44:48AM +0200, rejo at zenger.nl wrote 2.4K bytes in 67 lines about:
: Thanks! Someone sent me a few links to one or more cases in Germany, related to wikileaks.de. If you come across more, please let me know.

To be clear, wikileaks.de and tor are completely separate
cases. 'morphium' ran tor exit relays, wikileaks.de domain owner, and
a few other things, like cgiproxy, from many servers in Germany.

His Tor experience is here:
https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-talk/2011-February/006828.html.

His wikileaks.de experience is completely separate and
unrelated to his tor activities. His wikileaks.de raid is here,
http://wikileaks.de/wiki/Police_raid_home_of_Wikileaks.de_domain_owner_over_censorship_lists

As graramp mentioned, the CCC has been a central point of contact for most
of Europe when running into these situations. A huge amount of gratitude
to Juliusz and the CCC for helping tor relay operators in Europe.

morphium may have been the only one to actually go to court. Most times
the computers are seized and a forensics person analyzes them to find
nothing more than tor. The owner then has to fight to get their own
equipment back and charges are dropped. In some cases, we at Tor have
contacted the relevant police to explain Tor and help the forensic team
understand what is Tor and what is not Tor. There have been cases where
a criminal runs a tor relay thinking it provides them cover while they
do all of their illegal activities on the same computer. This latter
method doesn't work, by the way. It's trivial for a forensic team to
separate the legitimate tor relay from the criminal activity.

There are at least two cases where the exit operator has been slapped
with a 'national security' gag order and cannot talk about the case. In
these situations, their lawyer contacts Tor and I've provided proof
and notarized documentation that the person was running a tor relay at
the time. I've also had to provide expert witness testimony about Tor
as well.

Overall, from a quick check of letters sent, there have only been
around 12 exit relay seizures out of 1000 or so exit relays.

-- 
Andrew
http://tpo.is/contact
pgp 0x6B4D6475