Letter from the feds

[Alexander Janssen]

Hi all,

my turn for a story to tell now. I run the TOR-server "wormhole" in Germany.

On the 28th of December I got a letter from the BKA (the german
Federal Office of Criminal Investigation). The content of the letter
was something like that:

"The owner of the IP-Addres $my_servers_address is suspected of
posession of child pornography. Hereby we order you to tell us the
real name of the owner and disclose all relevant logfiles according to
§113 TKG in the time of the 26th of October, 7:00 PST. We also demand
the names of all your customers which use your service and we inform
you that disclosing our request to your customers may be punishable."

Obviously I was a bit scared about the "the owner of the IP-address
part" so I hired a lawyer. The overall text was also a bit far-off for
my taste, but whatever. My lawyer sent out a fax yesterday to the BKA
asking if I, as his client, am a suspect or a witness. He also stated
that I'm running a TOR-server and that no relevant log-files according
to §113 TKG exist. I case that I'm a suspect he asked for all the
files dealing with the investigation.

That was last night, today, about 20 hours later, we already got an
reply. The BKA acknowledged, that they understood my lawyer's
statement that the TOR-server does not create relevant logfiles and
claimed that this information is enough for their ongoing
investigations. Furthermore they say that they need no further
"statements" from my side. (which can be read as thanks, we're fine,
but who knows...)

Hm, they finally seem to have come to their senses. They really scared
the shit out of my wife and me, believe me. I don't know if their
floppy requests was intentional or not or if they wanted to scare me,
but that's nothing a lawyer can sort out.

Cheers, Alex.

-- 
"I am tired of all this sort of thing called science here... We have spent
millions in that sort of thing for the last few years, and it is time it
should be stopped."
 -- Simon Cameron, U.S. Senator, on the Smithsonian Institute, 1901.