Hello to all list-reading entities!
On Aug 16th 2024 German police considered it once again appropriate to raid the home&office at the registered address of our organization. The first raid was 2017. There are obviously still people working in German law enforcement today, who think that harassing a node-operator NGO would somehow lead to the de-anonymization of individual tor users. At least that is what they claim in the paperwork.
As with the first time, the raid team was fortunately a bit better educated and acted significantly more reasonable than the non-technical people applying for the raid and the judge signing it off. So again, no hardware was seized. Apart from one burnt (middle relay) node and some billing paperwork for the exit node this was all about, the team left the house after one and a half hours with mostly empty hands. We intend to legally challenge the search warrant to make sure that this does not happen again (but this is not what this email here is about).
These were once again one and a half hours with armed police in a personal living room, threatening to de-facto kill a livelihood and software business (carrying a truckload hardware away) of an non-profit board member to force cooperation.
As a consequence, I am personally no longer willing to provide my personal address&office-space as registered address for our non-profit/NGO as long as we risk more raids by running exit nodes. That is a risk I am just no longer willing to take anymore.
Artikel 5 e.V. is now calling for a general assembly on Sep 21st 2024. We are looking for new board members (who take over and organize a new registered address and keep running exits) or discuss ALL alternative options. These options include "just stop running exits" or even the most drastic step of liquidating the entire organization and distribution of the remaining budget to other German organizations (that would have to qualify under our non-profit by-laws).
Assembly time&location details can be found at https://artikel5ev.de/ We intend to provide a stream primarily for our members but also for interested parties who can not attend in person. The event/stream will however be in German only. Details for the stream will be made available on the website on short notice before the event starts. If you plan to attend in person, an upfront email would be appreciated, so we can pick the right room to set things up. Thank you!
Regards,
Gero Kühn for Artikel 5 e.V.
It would be a shame if all your nodes would go offline, I live in Germany and while raids were more common 10 years ago, it's sad to hear that this still happens to this date.
Ultimately, it just shows how illiterate the police is about the Telemediengesetz.
Do you run these nodes at home using your own routers and IPv4 addresses, possibly by using a business cable / fiber plan?
If not, then I do not see the need to raid the homes of exit operators, as even in Germany, most police agents are aware of Tor and some of the abuse (Child porn, and so on) that it is used for, however this only represents a single digit percentage of it's users.
Do your IPv4/IPv6 ranges have a WHOIS comment regarding the circumstance that they are used for Tor (exit) nodes?
I run a single ~75 MBit/s relay in a VM on my friends colocated server, in a non-crowded datacenter which has 12 Tor nodes in total last time I checked, albeit in the USA, so there are zero links to me and my personal information (even this e-mail address and it's associated name is just a made-up name).
Anyway, don't let this demoralize anyone in your organization, this is likely a wanted side-effect of the raid, and we desperately need more nodes in order to make sure that as many clients as possible are not routed through surveillance agency hosted nodes which have yet to be found and removed from the network.
Stay strong, George
On Sunday, September 8th, 2024 at 1:19 PM, Artikel 5 e.V. abuse@artikel5ev.de wrote:
Hello to all list-reading entities!
On Aug 16th 2024 German police considered it once again appropriate to raid the home&office at the registered address of our organization. The first raid was 2017. There are obviously still people working in German law enforcement today, who think that harassing a node-operator NGO would somehow lead to the de-anonymization of individual tor users. At least that is what they claim in the paperwork.
As with the first time, the raid team was fortunately a bit better educated and acted significantly more reasonable than the non-technical people applying for the raid and the judge signing it off. So again, no hardware was seized. Apart from one burnt (middle relay) node and some billing paperwork for the exit node this was all about, the team left the house after one and a half hours with mostly empty hands. We intend to legally challenge the search warrant to make sure that this does not happen again (but this is not what this email here is about).
These were once again one and a half hours with armed police in a personal living room, threatening to de-facto kill a livelihood and software business (carrying a truckload hardware away) of an non-profit board member to force cooperation.
As a consequence, I am personally no longer willing to provide my personal address&office-space as registered address for our non-profit/NGO as long as we risk more raids by running exit nodes. That is a risk I am just no longer willing to take anymore.
Artikel 5 e.V. is now calling for a general assembly on Sep 21st 2024. We are looking for new board members (who take over and organize a new registered address and keep running exits) or discuss ALL alternative options. These options include "just stop running exits" or even the most drastic step of liquidating the entire organization and distribution of the remaining budget to other German organizations (that would have to qualify under our non-profit by-laws).
Assembly time&location details can be found at https://artikel5ev.de/ We intend to provide a stream primarily for our members but also for interested parties who can not attend in person. The event/stream will however be in German only. Details for the stream will be made available on the website on short notice before the event starts. If you plan to attend in person, an upfront email would be appreciated, so we can pick the right room to set things up. Thank you!
Regards,
Gero Kühn for Artikel 5 e.V. _______________________________________________ tor-relays mailing list tor-relays@lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-relays
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Artikel 5 e.V. -
George Hartley -
Volker Mink