[tor-talk] actions taken against bad nodes

[grarpamp]

On Thu, Nov 5, 2015 at 4:09 PM, Lucas Teixeira <lucas at codingrights.org> wrote:
> should be easy to detect e.g. with the OONI infrastructure.

There are folks running scripts to detect various things, you
can find some of that in git. Some is driven by exitmap.
If you find some exits that are doing something you can
script against, feel free to post your work.

> Is there a mechanism in place to ban them from the network, are they

You can report malicious relays here where people may pick it
up, look into and confirm it and get them pipelined for banning as
needed. There are a couple of badrelays pages on wiki that may
interest you further.

> I realize that a good portion of those nodes are located on judicially
> hard places, but I also wonder if in some jurisdictions it would be
> possible to prosecute the owners of these nodes.

Citizen prosecutors are not something many countries permit,
it's not in the interest of the state. Tor Project itself has no
history of reporting such relays, but you can report any
confirmed malicious nodes to whatever authorities you wish
and hope they take it up under whatever digital crime laws
they may have. Keep in mind that many malicious nodes
are operated anonymously, and that many prosecutors are
clueless or busy with other things like victims and paper
violations in their own jurisdictions. Odds are you're not a
victim with standing in their jurisdiction, unless you start
playing with mapaddress or geoip to do that.

It's probably more effective to report them here, get
them confirmed and banned by dirauths, and even report
them to their hoster. It's certainly quicker than the courts.

Given there's no contractual relationship, it would be
interesting to see if a relay could seek tort or free speech
or something against tor for banning them, while at the
same time not being liable for whatever it was they were
doing in their local jurisdiction.