[Noisebridge-discuss] Anti-piracy / anti-Pirate Bay law currently in Congress

[Meredith L. Patterson]

On Mon, Sep 27, 2010 at 11:33:03PM -0500, Thomas Stowe wrote:
> if you do something via Tor, they're essentially going to go after the
> exit-point's owner which is another Tor user offering anonymity services so
> not only are you doing something stupid but you're putting the blame on
> someone else for what you did.

Wrong. Law enforcement may contact the owner of the exit node, but they can't prosecute the node's owner for someone else's activity. I know a number of anonymous remailer operators who have had to explain to LEOs that it is mathematically impossible for them to identify the sender of a message that came from their remailer; apparently the Secret Service is fairly clueful about this, the FBI not so much.

> There've been cases of Child Porn
> investigations and raids on innocent people because they were running Tor
> servers who almost faced jail time and spent thousands of dollars defending
> themselves in court and by that time they'd been in jail and on television
> for being a sex offender interested in child porn. 

Where are you getting this bullshit? This has never happened in the United States. One exit node operator in Germany has had a couple of run-ins with the police, and he did the right thing and got a lawyer. He never spent a day in court.

> I hope that you folks take this into consideration. I know
> about these technologies because I've used them in the past.

Given that you apparently haven't even read the first question in the Tor legal FAQ (http://www.torproject.org/eff/tor-legal-faq.html.en), I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion.

--mlp