Interception of tor exit traffic.

tor tor at algae-world.com
Fri Jun 10 07:06:03 UTC 2005


Hey Ben,
Sorry about offending you personally BUT ALL of those 6 "lightweight" 
legal texts point out the fact that not ONLY do TOR operators in the US 
have a RIGHT to monitor the misuse of their facilities and that such 
monitoring can be freely turned over to USG, state or law enforcement. 
Add into the effect of stored communications exempted by Jackson and 
later Councilman , on technical interception, hooking the tor output 
buffers or simply using BPF/PCAP providers on the same node as the tor 
software which read out of memory locations not intercept communication 
in transit and presto you have a quite legally monitored network it 
would seem. That IS of interest to US based tor operators and as the 
user of tor has NO contract explicit or implicit with either the 
middleman or the exit nodes there ARE no legal remedies to this sort of 
interception at present.

As Chris in his official guise of Technical Manager of EFF has chosen 
answer the initial posting with rudeness and insults
and did NOT directly address the issue the postings have all pointed to 
and instead gave the usual IANAL.
 I elected to post very brief lightweight extracts of the pertinent 
Title 18 code to the list, as well as the case in which 4th amendment 
protections against electronic communications intercept were vanished 
with the decision of the court in Councilman. As it stands now this is 
US law. As I and many others run tor nodes from our place of business 
this branch of law is critical to our operation of same tor nodes lest 
we get hauled off to jail for a remote tor user fetching say child porn 
through an exit node in the US.
and when its a choice between myself and some NAMBLA member abusing 
little boys via tor you can bet how fast ALL of the legally gathered 
logs from my SHADOW IDS  I or any other operator has will wind up in the 
hands of law enforcement voluntarily  when the prosecutor comes 
knocking, same for kidnapping,murder,rape or other threats against 
anothers person transmitted via tor/webmail /tor/imap tor/pop3 etc.


TOR and ECPA ARE NOT a SHIELD for criminal acts...


     again sorry to anyone offended BUT I am looking for an official 
response from EFF attorneys not Chris Palmers IANAL.
As all statutes involving this and case law up to and exceeding 
Councilman would seem to support my position that
Monitoring TOR exit traffic  to enable the continued availability of 
that service in the face of these threats would seem on the face of it 
to be legal(GET a Lawyers advice as I did).

Laws for the individual states may differ from ECPA however, again see a 
lawyer..

    no for US Tor operators this is NOT spam it is legal survival
as this is OR-talk not OR-dev this forum is an entirely appropriate 
place for this discussion.

   a tor operator


ps Now I will shut up having said my piece and wait for others opinions 
on the Subject at hand
that of monitoring of tor exit traffic.





        
Ben Wilhelm wrote:

>
> Dude. Stop spamming the mailing list. I'm perfectly fine with reading 
> seven emails on this subject, but seven emails consisting entirely of 
> dense legal text and brief corrections, sent by a single person, all 
> of which could have been trivially compiled into a *single* email, is 
> just plain annoying.
>
> (If someone wants to smack me down and say "no, this is perfectly fine 
> for this list", go for it, but I know I'd be annoyed if this was on a 
> mailing list I admined ;) )
>
> -Ben




More information about the tor-talk mailing list