Letter from the feds

[Alexander Janssen]

On 1/3/07, Fabian Keil <freebsd-listen at fabiankeil.de> wrote:
> "Alexander Janssen" <alexander.janssen at gmail.com> wrote:
> > "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."
>
> I got a similar letter about two weeks earlier,
> but the language was quite polite and no punishment promised.

The language wasn't offensive, it was still polite; I think that they
thought that I was offering some kind of comercial service and
therefore pulled all strings the german law allows.

> The BKA was interested in the person who used my exit nodes
> at the 26th of October, 6:40 PST, so I guess the thought
> crime offender was the same.
>
> I explained what Tor does and why German law forbids me
> to log the information they wanted and haven't heard
> anything back so far.

I wrote a similar letter but didn't send it, because I didn't know if
I was going to be suspected after sending out an explantion, that's
why I hired a lawyer.

> > 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.
>
> Unfortunately you'll still have to pay the lawyer yourself.

Well, yes, however, I knew that something like this would happen any
time soon anyways.
I absolutely agree with the feds that they have to investigate for I
don't approve abuse of the TOR-network at all, especially not
child-pornography.

On the other hand this is an improvement compared to what some LKAs
did in the last months, just randomly seizing machines without
bothering about how this could be related to anonymizing services.
So I actually approve the BKA's modus operandi, that's how it's
supposed to work. Just the style of the letter was scary.

> Fabian

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.