[tor-relays] Filtering TOR Non-exit Relay - Just Curious

[Nelson]

Tor Exit Relay have the ability to filter traffic by allowing the
operator make choices based on personal preferences for personal, legal
(ex: country of origin) and for other reasons.

Non-exit Relays do not have the ability to set "Relay Policies"
(torcc??), and why would they, considering that all this traffic is
encrypted anyway, as I understand it, and one would not ever know what
type of traffic it is, or its origin, based on the bandwidth graph. I
checked my smoothwall firewall logs it does not seem to show the traffic
flowing on my relay, I guess this would be obvious because it's Tor
traffic; unless I'm not filtering the logs correctly.

Running a Tor relay seems straightforward and one could just fire-it-up
and easily contribute to the network. But my curiosity gets the best of me.

I was looking to add additional URL Filter rules for my smoothwall as a
more centralized way of controlling what gets to the LAN for my users.
While checking for additional blocklists I came upon P2P rules and I
started to compare the new blocklists with my old ones and then I
stumbled upon PeerBlock which has been around for a while.

On Windows 7, PeerBlock seemed to provide two things I was looking to
test on a TOR Relay:

1. Real Time Traffic Logging (ip's and ports logged)
2. The ability to filter traffic.

Apparently I am able to do both with PeerBlock, although I'm sure there
are more suitable and capable tools available out there that do this,
but I'm not aware of or have used any of these tools.

In peerblock I can create new custom lists and completely block specific
ip ranges (ex: warez, torrents etc.), and I am able to see what traffic
is allowed or blocked based on policies created.

1. What problems, if any, arise from using peerblock and Tor together?
2. Why do we not have the ability to at least set our own policy for the
type of traffic on a relay just like an Exit Relay?