Researchers could face legal risks for Tor network snooping

mplsfox02 at sneakemail.com mplsfox02 at sneakemail.com
Thu Jul 24 17:05:05 UTC 2008


H D Moore:

> I would love to see this case go to court and set a precedent,  
> although I
> hope its the University that is targeted and not the actual  
> researchers.
>
> The CNET article is just FUD though -- yes, the law is fuzzy in this  
> area,
> but I highly doubt that any federal prosecutor is going to pick this  
> up
> unless a specific indivual or company claims damages.


Exactly, FUD was also the first thing that came to my mind while  
reading it. What about the whole research area, that is doing similar  
analyses on normal non-anonymous backbone traffic?

I think this is a very interesting work and exactly what is needed.  
Although, these guys obviously have a lot of sensitive data sitting on  
some harddisks, which needs a very careful handling. (Still better  
than if that data came from non-Tor traffic.) Somebody has to watch  
them, while they work with that data, and to make sure that only data  
is kept that is really necessary for their work. (Keeping the first  
150 bytes of every packet sound like more than necessary.) So I wonder  
why their university didn't want to care about that.



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