court trial against me -

[Mirko Thiesen]

Hi,

> 1: by German law a Tor node admin is something like an access 
> provider.
> You are not responsible for your traffic. If the court have only an IP
> address and you have a tor status log, they have nothing.
> 
> 2: Tor is a legal service in Germany (today and yesterday, tomorrow we
> will see). If you provided only a legal service, it is no way to
> construct a case of aiding and abetting and you are not a 
> disquieter or
> something like that.

I know these facts. The problem is that obviously neither the judge nor the
public prosecutor knew them. The lesson I learned is that a judge doesn't
like to be told that her opinion a) is not logical and b) does not conform
to the laws she is bound to.
> 
> 3: May be, there is a judge, who do not these facts. The law 
> depends not
> only on one judge. Dont give up.

This might be true, but for me the situation is as follows: Currently I live
in this small village called Tuebuingen with a quite clear number of judges
and public prosecutors. See, this is the countryside here. It's not like
Hamburg, Berlin, Koeln. If you fight here, chances are that you might face a
strong opposition. 

Also, this court (Amtsgericht Tuebingen) is the exact same court that
sentenced a student to pay a fine for wearing a crossed-out(!) swastika not
so long ago. Details can be found here:
<http://www.spiegel.de/unispiegel/wunderbar/0,1518,407112,00.html> (German
only). It might have even been the same judge as the article mentions a
"Richterin" (female judge) and I suppose there are not that many female
judges here in Tuebingen. With these facts in mind, I decided to agree to
the paragraph 153 thing.

Yes, I might have given up. And I think it will bother me for a long, long
time. After the trial was over yesterday I was so disappointed that I
considerd quitting my job and moving back to Berlin or at least away from
the south. But that would be just an additional punishment for me.
 
> 4: You need help. Try to contact the following organizations:
[...]

Thanks, but AFAIK there is nothing I can do anymore as a dismissal according
to paragaph 153 can't be appealed to. Maybe contacting these organizations
before the trial was held could have helped. But my impression was that the
people involved were only interested in telling me what a bad person I am
and not in serving up justice.

I mean, look at the facts: Someone ordered an electronic voucher. This
voucher is usually just an email containing some kind of unique database
identifier. Why didn't they just contact amazon.de again and asked them
where they actually sent the goods that were ordered with this voucher to?
And doesn't Web.de here in Germany verify postal addresses of all their
freemail customers by sending them a letter containing a code they have to
enter in order to activate their email account? So why didn't they ask
Web.de for the real address of the person who ordered the voucher?

The answer is as sad as it is disappointing: The just didn't care about the
case itself. They saw that someone commited a crime, and so someone - be it
the right person or not - had to be blamed for it.
 
> By the way (for other admins), it is not a good solution, to 
> ignore the
> first letter. Go to the "visit" and explain, what you have 
> done and what
> you have not done.

In my case the police obviously didn't have a clue about what was going on.
It would have been so easy to figure out that the IP address amazon.de had
in their log files actually belonged to a Tor node. See, I'm not the kind of
person that generally distrusts the police, the government, or any authority
just because they are an authority. I somehow even like the police - they
saved me from trouble lots of years ago. But I don't know if the police
officer who asked me to come by would have understood what I could have told
him. I'm not sure he would have believed me. So I didn't see any chances of
improving the situation for me by talking to the police. However, being the
talkative person I happen to be, I was really afraid of talking me into more
trouble than I was already in. And this is exactly the reason why the
legislator leaves it up to you whether you talk to the police or not.
Looking back, it might have been better to talk to the police in the first
place. But then again - who knows?

Bye, K&K,
T-Zee
-- 
|Mirko Thiesen          "We're with you all the way, mostly"|
|Mirko.Thiesen at Tuebingen.MPG.de    | http://www.kyb.mpg.de/ |
|MPI for Biological Cybernetics    | Phone: +49-7071-601-638|
|Spemannstr. 38, D-72076 Tuebingen | FAX:   +49-7071-601-616|
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: smime.p7s
Type: application/x-pkcs7-signature
Size: 3195 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-talk/attachments/20071115/0b4dc6b6/attachment.bin>