Hello everyone! The holidays and the 38C3 are coming up. Unfortunately nobody from our organization will be able to attend the congress in person this year. In case that the police raid in August is going to be a topic for the relay operators meetup, we would like to provide you with a small update regarding the current state here.
The legal complaint procedure is still ongoing but last week -after several delays- we were finally able to get access to the court records for the case. We are not allowed to (and will not) directly quote/publish any of this material.
We can however make the following information public at this point: - This case is about an (unsuccessful) cybergrooming attempt from Q2/2024. - We have a list of IP-Adresses supposedly used by the perpetrator. - Only one of them is one of our exit nodes. - Others point to other exit nodes. - Some of these other exit nodes are also run by German organizations. - To our knowledge, none of these other organizations were visited like we were. - In contrast to what the prosecution stated as part of the complaint procedure, several pages in the case file clearly state that they knew and fully understood that the server in question was never located at the home/mail address of our organization. - This was clear even before the case was handed off to the local department responsible for our current registered address. - At least some of the people involved also fully understand Tor and the implications. - As we suspected, they also knew (and documented) upfront that this was a home address and not some sort of rented office or server farm. - In combination, it looks a lot like several involved parties did not fully read and/or understand the entire file before playing their part in the puzzle.
It pretty much confirms what we already suspected. Whether all this is a simple result of repeated organizational failure, unfortunate lack of technical understanding or even malicious intent against us or the Tor network in general, is an interpretation we will leave up to you.
Just be aware that if you are operating Tor exits in Germany, this could currently happen to you as well - even if you follow ALL the best-practices rules and recommendations currently out there. Maybe we just have the "luck" of being registered at the wrong city with the wrong people working on these cases. Maybe not.
In any case... enjoy the holidays and (if you attend) the congress in Hamburg as well.
Kind regards,
Gero for Artikel 5 e.V.