[tor-relays] Legal status of operating Tor exit in UK?

[Jonathan Baker-Bates]

The ISP is Jump Networks, with whom I have a co-location in their Telehouse
suite. I'd recommend them highly otherwise, but somewhat unexpectedly,
they're using the bad traffic report as an opportunity to engage me in a
rather philosophical debate about Tor. It's interesting to hear their
opinions on topics such as how they think most Tor nodes are compromised to
drop malware on clients that use them; that there is probably little
privacy to be had using Tor because most exits are run by government
agencies, and that in their view anyone using Tor to anonymise their
traffic is being naive. But the main message I'm hearing is that they have
a problem with Tor, not necessarily anything to do with legal issues in
fact, come to think of it.

So it's a delicate situation really.

When you say ask for static IP, I have that - in fact the node runs on a
dedicated VM that's on the physical server, and has suitably clear reverse
DNS entry, etc. No SWIP though.

I think I might just get back to them and see if they can clarify their
policy. I don't want to monitor traffic, if only because the Tor project
warns again it. The ISP may of course say their policy is to shut down my
exit, in which case, well ... I feel honoured to have contributed to Tor
for the last six years.

Jonathan


On 8 September 2015 at 23:24, Billy Humphreys <PokeAcer549 at outlook.com>
wrote:

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> Which ISP is it? I'm a fellow UK person, but I don't use a UK VPS/ISP
> for this. Tell them that you are an advocate for anonyminity, and that
> you refuse to monitor traffic. No ISP can force you to do that (they
> have black boxes to do this shit anyway) - You can use
> https://exonerator.torproject.org/ to prove that you were an exit
> relay at the time.
> They want you to put Snort IDS on it because it QoS'es your internet,
> and Tor may cause a false-alarm. So you can tell them this, and ask if
> they'd consider a static IP, SWIP, and all that stuff so that you deal
> with the emails yourself, and you just send them the big template to
> stop them.
>
> When I briefly ran one on my ISP network, we got no letters
> complaining (I'm with British Telecom/BT), and they can't make you do
> anything, remember this.
> - --Billy
>
> On 08/09/2015 21:04, Jonathan Baker-Bates wrote:
> > I run an exit node with an ISP who initially indicated they would
> > not have a problem with Tor as long as I was transparent about
> > what I was doing, and ran a sufficiently reduced exit policy.
> >
> > They have now sent me evidence of malicious traffic coming from the
> > exit. I don't think they've had any 3rd party complaints about this
> > traffic, but they have expressed various misgivings about Tor in
> > general. They now also want me to consider running Snort IDS on the
> > outgoing traffic.
> >
> > I don't intend to monitor my traffic. But it occurs to me I don't
> > know whether my ISP needs to be worried about it or not. The last
> > one wasn't, so why them?
> >
> > I've asked the EFF about the legal situation in the UK, who passed
> > me to the Open Rights Group. They've not replied to my enquiry as
> > of three weeks ago.
> >
> > So does anyone know of any reliable source of information on
> > running Tor exits in the UK? What would happen if my ISP pressed
> > me to monitor my traffic, and I refused on legal grounds? I'm not
> > suggesting I actually do that, or that there are even any legal
> > grounds to refuse. In fact right now I'm resigned to closing down
> > the node if my ISP turns up the heat. They probably have me by the
> > balls.
> >
> > But I'm at least curious, and can't immediately find any
> > information about things like public carrier status, or traffic
> > monitoring conducted by people like me when it's done in the
> > context of onion routing.
> >
> > Thanks in advance for any help.
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________ tor-relays mailing
> > list tor-relays at lists.torproject.org
> > https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-relays
> >
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