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Suggestions for Tor Relay Operators after a Police interaction
by Andrew Lewman 30 Nov '12

30 Nov '12

# Suggestions for Tor Relay Operators after a Police interaction Disclaimer: We are not lawyers, and this is not legal advice. This is friendly advice from those of us at Tor who work with relay operators after a police visit or raid. This is a collection of suggestions of what we've gathered from five years of helping people like you. Exit relay operator visits are exceedingly rare. You are in the 1% of operators ever visited or even raided by a police force. If you're reading this message, then you probably have a poor photocopy of the warrant the police served to you. The warrant may mention Tor and some suspected criminal activity (such as terrorism, money laundering, child abuse materials, or copyright violations). 1. Read the EFF legal FAQ for relay operators, https://www.torproject.org/eff/tor-legal-faq.html.en. 2. Find legal representation. A list of possible legal advisers can be found here, https://blog.torproject.org/blog/start-tor-legal-support-directory. If none of these people are in your country, or close to you, ask either the EFF or Tor Project. We can likely help you find someone in your jurisdiction. 3. Get a copy of the full warrant. There is a generally a process to get a full copy of the warrant. It will have details you'll need to know to defend yourself. At a minimum, it's likely to have a timestamp and IP address of your exit relay. 4. Make sure the IP address in question is your exit relay and was a valid relay at the time in question. We make available the exonerator tool to look through the entire history of the Tor Network to find your relay, https://metrics.torproject.org/exonerator.html. 5. Get in touch with The Tor Project, preferably by email, see https://www.torproject.org/about/contact for finding ways to reach us. If you need someone official to explain Tor to either a bondsman, judge, or the police, generally phone works best, https://www.torproject.org/about/contact#phone. When you contact Tor, we need the following details in order to help you maintain your innocence: - The IP address of each relay. - The timestamp (date and time of day) for each IP address in the warrant. - How to reach you or your legal adviser. 6. Likely, your legal adviser is going to want a signed, notarized, official letter from the Tor Project stating the IP address was or was not an exit relay at the date and time in question. They are going to want this mailed via trackable method (FedEx, UPS, DHL, registered mail, etc). We need to know if you want one letter per IP/timestamp combination, or if we can put everything into one letter. Best of luck going forward. The police generally only receive an IP address and a street address. They do not know it is a tor exit relay. Some national police forces in Europe and North America are sophisticated enough to determine "tor or not" before they execute a warrant. Generally, but not always, these national police forces send detectives to interview you (known as a "knock and talk"), rather than send in a SWAT team (known as a raid). The press repeats the SWAT team stories because it generates page views for their organization. It's not the norm. Tor is available for further help, whether it be as an expert witness, further explanations of how Tor works, etc. Just ask for help, we're happy to do so. By sharing your experience with us, you also help us to help law enforcement understand Tor better in the future. Thanks for sharing and thanks for running a relay. -- Andrew http://tpo.is/contact pgp 0x6B4D6475

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Prepared for [Raided for running a Tor exit node]?
by grarpamp 30 Nov '12

30 Nov '12

>> Running an exit node from home DSL or Cable is bad idea. One must look >> for a Tor friendly ISP and have balls made of steel! ... ISP[/hoster] and[/or] have ... > However, I do not believe it is that way in > the United States What 'way'? Running an exit node at home, or elsewhere, would seem to come down to... a) Are you physically ready for a query / subpoena / search warrant / exigent raid? Are things segregated by room? Are your doors and machines labeled with the same sort of exit node notice you'd put on the TCP port and in DNS? Have you inventoried, photographed and documented your setup and property? Do you have offsite backups? Are private things encrypted? Are any co-habitants aware and similarly prepared? b) Are you mentally ready? Is your life and butt otherwise clean, legal, and organized? If you were to appear in court, how would you act and be perceived? How do you feel about being in the news and in public docs? Have you networked with other operators and entities? c) Are you legally, financially, and timewise ready? Have you consulted with and preselected a couple attorneys? Have you made arrangements for making bail? How will you make court required appearances? All these sorts of meta things, and surely more, come into play whether or not you're ever raided. I'd suggest making a wiki article for them.

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How to get client locale statistics without arm?
by tor-admin 30 Nov '12

30 Nov '12

Hi, I would like to know from which countries my nodes are mostly used. I tried to use arm for this but on high capacity relays arm eats the same cpu resources as the tor process it monitors, if the connection panel is activated. Switching to the connection panel lets arm often freeze. Is there another way to get country statistics from a node? Maybe something build in Tor? Thanks, Torland

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Bandwidth and server leads [was: Tor raid]
by grarpamp 29 Nov '12

29 Nov '12

> From: elijah wright <elw(a)stderr.org> > Date: Thu, 29 Nov 2012 13:38:51 -0600 > Cc: nanog(a)nanog.org > Subject: Re: William was raided for running a Tor exit node. > We had a guy (aka potential customer) inquire the other day about hosting a > Tor exit on our infrastructure the other day; he disappeared fairly > quickly when he figured out that we weren't just going to give him an > endless supply of unmetered 10G bandwidth. I was looking forward to > billing him. :-) Contemporary mailing list lols aside, I believe you'll find that most operators in this space are quite serious and professional. If you're a potential friend of Tor, anonymity networks and the general thought space around it... and your price [or that of someone you know, nanog or otherwise, who might be such a friend] was highly competitive, or even special... I'd be fairly confident that consultation with those on this list would lead to a sale of said (or related) billable services. Feel free to forward and/or put any interested parties in touch with this list or torproject.org.

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Deploy relays using hidden exit IP's?
by grarpamp 29 Nov '12

29 Nov '12

Shouldn't some exit relays (funded or not) be deployed to use an exit IP that is different from it's advertised exit IP in order to prevent a simplistic form of blocking based on scraping the descriptor set? I think this can happen if the default route is out another interface or secondary address. Something of that nature.

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setting up a Tor exit node
by esolve esolve 29 Nov '12

29 Nov '12

I want to use Tor browser bundle to set up a Tor exit node in vidalia, I click "set up relay" -> sharing then there are some options, I checked "Relay traffic for the Tor network(exit relay)" and then click "ok" however, it doesn't work, and the exit relay option is automatically unchecked, while the option "relay traffic inside the tor network (non-exit relay)" is checked how can I set up a Tor exit node? thanks!

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TOR relay and their flags
by androny 29 Nov '12

29 Nov '12

Hello all! My torrc main config: SocksPort 0 RunAsDaemon 1 DataDirectory /tmp/.tor ControlPort 9051 CookieAuthentication 1 ORPort 4999 AvoidDiskWrites 1 BridgeRelay 1 ExitPolicy reject *:* so, its pure relay. Run arm and got: "flags: none" Well, read flags definitions at https://gitweb.torproject.org/torspec.git?a=blob_plain;hb=HEAD;f=dir-spec.t… and still don't understand it :-) My tor has almost 4 days uptime, and at logs have: ----- Self-testing indicates your ORPort is reachable from the outside. Excellent. Publishing server descriptor ----- Performing bandwidth self-test...done. ----- Tor has successfully opened a circuit. Looks like client functionality is working ----- Connections (1 inbound, 6 circuit, 1 control) ----- It means, it works well - so, why my tor relay server doesn't have an "Running" flag, "Valid" flag or "Stable"? Regards And-ron

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DFRI is running two sponsored exits
by Linus Nordberg 26 Nov '12

26 Nov '12

Hi Moritz, DFRI [1] is running two relays, DFRI0 and DFRI3, which should qualify as fast relays as defined by sponsor j. (They were just recently bumped From 10 MB to 12.5 MB. They both have an exit policy allowing the ports explicitly required on https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/sponsors/SponsorJ.) We'd love to be able to get some funds for this which would make it possible for us to run more exit traffic. We only have one /24 network to run exit traffic from atm though so this is all we can do for now without breaking the stated diversity rules. (Anybody sitting on an IPv4 /24 PI that we can borrow for a year or so? We'd handle it with care!) We could technically run bridges too but we would have to discuss this internally some more first. Do we really want to take money for running entry _and_ exit relays? Isn't that exactly how you'd attack Tor users if you had the power, by controlling entry and exit? If we've missed some public discussion on this topic, please point us at it. [1] https://dfri.se/index.en/ Thanks, Linus, DFRI

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Setting up new Tor relay
by Lance Hathaway 25 Nov '12

25 Nov '12

Hi all, I'm trying to set up a Tor bridge relay as an NT service under Windows 2003 x64. It runs, but only when I -don't- pass it a torrc file. Specifically, I've tried the following: 1. Installed service using "tor --service install". This installed the Tor service, with files located in "C:\Documents and Settings\LocalService\tor". I copied a torrc file into this directory and edited it to correctly set the ports and other options to be a bridge relay. After placing this file into the directory, attempting to start the service results in error 1064: an exception occurred in the service when handling the control request. Renaming or removing the torrc file allows the service to start. 2. After reading some old posts to tor-talk and tor-relays, I ensured that the directory has full permissions assigned to SERVICE and LOCAL SERVICE accounts. No change. 3. I removed the service and created a new directory for the configuration and log files, located at "C:\torsvc". I installed the service again with "tor --service install -option -f "C:\torsvc\torrc". I also ensured the new directory had all permissions set correctly. The service installed as "tor -net-service" without any options and executed successfully. I stopped the service and fixed the path in the registry to include "-f "C:\torsvc\torrc"", but then the service wouldn't start any more. 4. I verified the permissions on the torsvc directory. After removing the -f option from the service, the service starts successfully again, albeit without my configs (including log locations which would tell me what was going wrong). Sorry to be a bother, but could anybody offer me some enlightenment on what I'm missing??? -Lance

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(no subject)
by Znerol2 25 Nov '12

25 Nov '12

Sent from Samsung Mobile

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