Any known Tor relay seizures (in Germany)?
Hello everybody, do you know of any relay seizures of non-exit relays? In the legal FAQ [1] this "risk" is only listed below exit relays. Have there been any of such events in Germany (either exit- or any other nodes)? Would I have to worry about seizures if I run a guard or middle relay in Germany? Regards, Thomas [1] https://www.torproject.org/eff/tor-legal-faq.html.en
On 02/29/2016 12:47 AM, Thomas wrote:
do you know of any relay seizures of non-exit relays? In the legal FAQ [1] this "risk" is only listed below exit relays. Have there been any of such events in Germany (either exit- or any other nodes)?
Would I have to worry about seizures if I run a guard or middle relay in Germany?
Highly unlikely. A non-exit relay only forwards encrypted traffic 'within' the Tor network. To my knowledge, nobody has ever received any (law enforcement or even other) inquiry regarding a non-exit relay anywhere. The risks for seizures of exit relays are also minimal. What can happen if you run them as individual is that the police comes with a warrant and raids you because they assume you were the criminal (and then later return everything and the case against you is dropped since running an exit itself is legally just fine), but I haven't heard of any case like that in the past years. They have all seemed to have learned what Tor is, and all they do sometimes is ask for 'subscriber information' (which you don't have). -- Moritz Bartl https://www.torservers.net/
On 02/28/2016 06:57 PM, Moritz Bartl wrote:
The risks for seizures of exit relays are also minimal. What can happen if you run them as individual is that the police comes with a warrant and raids you because they assume you were the criminal (and then later return everything and the case against you is dropped since running an exit itself is legally just fine), but I haven't heard of any case like that in the past years. They have all seemed to have learned what Tor is, and all they do sometimes is ask for 'subscriber information' (which you don't have).
Exactly. They all seem to have a general understanding of what Tor is and maybe a bit about how it works. It's been my experience that law enforcement will send an inquiry, be told by the ISP that it's an exit node, they realize the difficulty of tracing the original source, and then nothing more (at least from our perspective) will happen. That of course depends on the country, its laws, and the technical skills of any interested law enforcement. Follow that blog post that shows how to set up your exit to minimize harassment. The ISP can easily set a reverse DNS entry, and you eliminate a significant amount of spam and attacks by using a reduced exit policy, especially if you get rid of the standard ports for SSH and Telnet traffic. A custom landing page doesn't hurt either; mine looks like this: http://198.50.200.131/ -- Jesse V
On Montag, 29. Februar 2016 00:47:47 CEST, Thomas wrote:
Hello everybody,
do you know of any relay seizures of non-exit relays? In the legal FAQ [1] this "risk" is only listed below exit relays. Have there been any of such events in Germany (either exit- or any other nodes)?
Would I have to worry about seizures if I run a guard or middle relay in Germany?
Hi Thomas, I'm operating a non-exit tor relay from my home in Germany since more than a year. I can't imagine a situation where the authorities would be interested in the fact that I'm operating a non-exit relay. The only interested party might be your ISP due to the additional traffic. Thomas
participants (4)
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Jesse V -
Moritz Bartl -
Thomas -
Thomas Braun