On Wed, May 23, 2012 at 07:44:48AM +0200, rejo@zenger.nl wrote 2.4K bytes in 67 lines about: : Thanks! Someone sent me a few links to one or more cases in Germany, related to wikileaks.de. If you come across more, please let me know.
To be clear, wikileaks.de and tor are completely separate cases. 'morphium' ran tor exit relays, wikileaks.de domain owner, and a few other things, like cgiproxy, from many servers in Germany.
His Tor experience is here: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-talk/2011-February/006828.html.
His wikileaks.de experience is completely separate and unrelated to his tor activities. His wikileaks.de raid is here, http://wikileaks.de/wiki/Police_raid_home_of_Wikileaks.de_domain_owner_over_...
As graramp mentioned, the CCC has been a central point of contact for most of Europe when running into these situations. A huge amount of gratitude to Juliusz and the CCC for helping tor relay operators in Europe.
morphium may have been the only one to actually go to court. Most times the computers are seized and a forensics person analyzes them to find nothing more than tor. The owner then has to fight to get their own equipment back and charges are dropped. In some cases, we at Tor have contacted the relevant police to explain Tor and help the forensic team understand what is Tor and what is not Tor. There have been cases where a criminal runs a tor relay thinking it provides them cover while they do all of their illegal activities on the same computer. This latter method doesn't work, by the way. It's trivial for a forensic team to separate the legitimate tor relay from the criminal activity.
There are at least two cases where the exit operator has been slapped with a 'national security' gag order and cannot talk about the case. In these situations, their lawyer contacts Tor and I've provided proof and notarized documentation that the person was running a tor relay at the time. I've also had to provide expert witness testimony about Tor as well.
Overall, from a quick check of letters sent, there have only been around 12 exit relay seizures out of 1000 or so exit relays.