Why you need balls of steel to operate a Tor exit node

Nicky van Etten n.v.etten at gmail.com
Wed Sep 9 20:34:57 UTC 2009


And these treats are rapidly growing throughout western countries, i also
stopped running an exit node now, guess being relay is all there is left to
do now.
I started supporting FreeNet now since it is only an internal network there
wont be external traffic thats logged or considered illegal anywhere.

On Wed, Sep 9, 2009 at 10:09 PM, Eugen Leitl <eugen at leitl.org> wrote:

>
>
> http://calumog.wordpress.com/2009/03/18/why-you-need-balls-of-steel-to-operate-a-tor-exit-node/
>
> Why you need balls of steel to operate a Tor exit node
>
> By calumog
>
> I became interested in Tor in the spring of 2007 after reading about the
> situation in Burma and felt that I would like to do something, anything, to
> help. As a geek and lover of the internet it seemed the best thing I could
> do
> was to run Tor as an exit node to allow those under jurisdictions that
> censor
> the  internet free access to the information they need. I had a lot of
> unused
> bandwidth and it seemed like a philanthropic use of it to donate that to
> Tor.
>
> Tor is a system of anonymizing proxy servers which allows you to visit
> resources on the web, not just web sites, without revealing your ip
> address.
> This is extremely useful for those who are compromised in their access to
> the
> internet because it means, rather than attempting to connect directly to
> the
> resource in question, say Wikipedia, which might be filtered by their
> government, they connect to a Tor relay which ultimately routes the request
> to the resource in question via an exit node. Exit nodes are special kinds
> of
> relays which proffer the request on behalf of the original client revealing
> their ip address, not that of the original requestor, to the destination
> resource. I sometimes imagine how exciting it must be for soemone in Burma,
> say, or China, to load up Tor and browse to a web site they have never been
> able to see before. And to know that there is nothing, nothing, that
> reveals
> who it really is who is visiting.
>
> I totally believe in Tor. I think it is a magnificent force for the
> circumvention of internet censorship but there is a problem.  I was visited
> by the police in November 2008 because my ip address had turned up in the
> server logs of a site offering, or perhaps trading in (I was not told the
> details of the offence) indecent images of children. The date of the
> offence
> was about one month after I started the server so it looks as though the
> site
> in question had been under surveillance for more than a year.  It was what
> is
> known as a ‘dawn raid’ and, amazingly enough, my children were still asleep
> when it occured. Thank God.  I explained to the officers, who we had heard
> threatening to break the door down before we let them in, about Tor but
> they
> had never heard of it. My wife says she thinks they were about to arrest me
> before that. I was not arrested. I was told not to touch the computer and
> it
> was placed, considerately, in a black plastic bag and taken away for
> forensic
> examination.  I was OK at first. I knew that somebody had gone through my
> server to access that material and that I was not guilty of any offence but
> as the weeks wore on it started to get to me.
>
> I was overwhelmed by horror to be implicated in such a thing. I was
> desperately worried about my family. One of the officers had told my wife
> that Social Services would be informed as a matter of course and there was
> a
> possibility that my children would be taken into care.  The low point came
> about two weeks after the visit by the police when I totalled my car. I was
> distracted, stressed and unable to accurately assess the road conditions. I
> ploughed into a hedgerow at speed, destroying the car which we had just
> bought,  but, luckily, walked out of it with only bruised ribs.  I didn’t
> have the money to hire a lawyer so I just sat the thing out. From time to
> time the police called with an estimate of when the investigation would be
> finished but none of that meant very much because those dates came and
> passed
> with no resolution.
>
> Eventually, four months after the visit, I picked up a voice message from
> the
> police inviting me to call back. When I called  I was told that no evidence
> had been retrieved and the machine would be returned to me.  I think, in
> retrospect, I was desperately naive to run a Tor exit server on a home
> computer but I didn’t believe that an ip address in a server log would be
> enough evidence to warrant seizing equipment.  My wife, God bless her, was
> absolutely marvellous throughout the whole thing and never doubted me.  I
> have read with interest about the need to make Tor faster and that that
> largely depends on having more nodes but there is no way I can contemplate
> offering my ip address as a service to internet anonymity any more.  It was
> very frightening for me to be implicated in a serious crime.  As a parent
> of
> very young children I have an extensive network of friends and contacts in
> my
> neighbourhood who also have children. As we know the subject of paedophilia
> is not one that can be debated with any rationality at all in the UK. It is
> surrounded by hysteria. I was terrified that people would find out that my
> computer had been taken because of that – ‘no smoke without fire’.  I don’t
> know what can be done about any of this. To my mind running an exit node is
> extremely high risk. I think Tor is important but I don’t have any ideas
> about how to support it at the moment.
>



-- 
Ciphered/Signed email preferred!
GnuPG KeyID: 0x42435F30
GnuPG DSA2 KeyID: 0x23286031
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-talk/attachments/20090909/7608ddad/attachment.htm>


More information about the tor-talk mailing list