Some legal trouble with TOR in France

[Olivier Barbut]

Hello dear tor talkers,

I'm running the tor router "mini", located in paris, france, and I 
believe I have to share with you what happened to me last wednesday,the 
10th of May. My router was an outside gateway, doing request for tor 
anonymous users.

Last wednesday morning, at 7:45, three cops did knock at my door. They 
suspected me to have downloaded some child porn videos. As I was waking 
up, I understood it was tor-related. I did explain them I was a TOR 
outside gateway, but they didn't knew about it. They searched everywhere 
in my small home and took every support they could find: hard drives 
they removed from computers, cds, disks, and then they took me to the 
police station, at the child protection service, jailing me the whole 
day while they was searching my hard drives and cds for traces of the 
video they was looking for.

They did asked me if they was a way to trace back to the criminal who 
downloaded this child abuse video, but I told them "not in my knowledge" 
and "the tor network is designed to make this impossible, keeping no log 
of traffic".

 At 19:00, having not found these video, having learned more about tor 
and confirmated I was running it, they freed me, giving me back my cds 
and hard drives.

It's sad the way some people use their freedom, e.g. participating in 
child abuse, but I'm still a strong believer in the necessity of 
anonymity on the internet.

As I asked them, they did assure me they accessed my hard drives 
read-only, using hardware write disabler, but I still prefer not to run 
it straight from the hard drive they had in hand for the whole day as I 
know cops are not that trustable. The "mini" router will be back in a 
few days. Not getting paranoid, but using paranoïa to make sane decisions !

Do you know if similar things did happenned to other routers ?

If you wants some more details, or have advice for me please ask and /or 
give.

Thanks everyone for making this possible !


Olivier Barbut