German Police Arrest Admin of Tor Anonymity Server

An anonymous reader writes "In a recent blog posting, a German operator of a Tor anonymous proxy server revealed that he was arrested by German police officers at the end of July. Showing up at his house at midnight on a Sunday night, police cuffed and arrested him in front of his wife and seized his equipment. In a display of both bitter irony and incompetence, the police did not take or shut-down the Tor server responsible for the traffic they were interested in, which was located in a data center, over 500km away. In the last year, Germany has passed a draconian new anti-security research law and raided seven different data centers to seize Tor servers. While back in 2003, A German court ordered the developers of a different anonymity network to build a back-door into their system."

500km?

[flyingfsck (986395)]

That puts the server in another country I guess. Anyhoo, it sounds like is time to escape Honecker and the Stasi and jump the wall... Uhh, what?

Suggestion

[markov_chain (202465)]

I propose to suspend Godwin's law for this article, because it will be really difficult to have a debate of any depth.

A little perspective for everyone thinking that

[patio11 (857072)]

He was arrested. He will now go into extended negotiations with a prosecutor, during the entirety of which he will have a lawyer present. If the negotiations don't go favorably for him, he will have a fair trial. He will probably be convicted of it, which is an occupational hazard of doing things which the government has illegalized. After being convicted, he will be given a first-time-offender wrist-slap, probably a few months of probation and a stern warning not to do it again. Perhaps he will spend a few months of not-terribly-rigorous time in jail -- I'd bet against it but I'm not German. He'll lose quite a bit of money to attourney fees, less whatever the Tor community raises for his defense (I'm not optimistic), and probably have some equipment seized.

You know what doesn't happen?

He doesn't get summarily executed.
His wife doesn't get raped at gunpoint.
His child doesn't get burned in an oven.

People throw around the word fascist to describe any policy they don't like (that core observation is the heart of Godwin's law). Excepting the geographical accident that places both of them in Germany, there is NOTHING analagous between Nazism and the actions of the government in this case. If you want to convince people of the rightness of deploying a Tor network, keep a cool head and do not use any goose-stepping analogies, because they will brand you as a perspectiveless fanatic who is not to be taken seriously.

you make it all sound so reasonable

[Scudsucker (17617)]

But I don't see any reasonableness in prosecuting an inherently reasonable law. Like that (black) high school student who had the book thrown at him for having sex with his (white) girlfriend because she was a couple years younger than him and broke an asinine law in Georgia [go.com].

People throw around the word fascist to describe any policy they don't like (that core observation is the heart of Godwin's law). Excepting the geographical accident that places both of them in Germany, there is NOTHING analagous between Nazism and the actions of the government in this case.

So what? Was Mussolini German?

German gov hasn't outlawed anonymity (yet)

[erlehmann (1045500)]

He will probably be convicted [...], which is an occupational hazard of doing things which the government has illegalized.

as i pointed out, the thing he did isn't a crime. [slashdot.org]

the point is, that this is either
a) police stupidity
b) scare tactics

i'd safely bet on the latter.

Re:German gov hasn't outlawed anonymity (yet)

[DaedalusHKX (660194)]

Yes, but in any free society, you can also pick on the fat guy.

Maybe if it happened, more fat guys would get in shape. I did it. Long story, but if a man wants to do something, nothing stops him. Same for the ladies.

On the other hand... who's the idiot who came up with the idea to teach our kids that seeing something will traumatize them? It is the fear of excelling that makes most people complacent. Afraid of blood? Take a class on first aid. Afraid of sharks? Go shark fishing. Afraid of guns? Take a rifle or pistol class. Afraid of freedom? Try it :) Challenging fears and beating them down is more liberating than all the fancy documents written by our ancestors. Hence why I love coming on here now and arguing in my free time.

Chilling effect

[jc42 (318812)]

We can now easily predict that the German government will soon find it difficult to hire people with an admitted knowledge of computer security topics. If you were German, would you admit to such knowledge to an official questioner?

Sorta like how the US government has been complaining about the difficulty of hiring Arabic translators, despite the statistics from a few years back saying that there were several million US residence who were fluent in Arabic. (And, contrary to the jokes going around, they aren't all gay. ;-)

It's commonly known as "shooting yourself in the foot".

HA! Denmark upped the ante

[Splab (574204)]

yesterday when the powers that be introduced the logging act. All data connections, emails and phone calls has to be logged and kept on record for at least a year. Beat that!

Scare tactic.

[ScrewMaster (602015)]

People are making a big deal out of supposed incompetence of the German police in that they didn't even get the actual Tor server. Who cares? That's irrelevant. This is not about taking down a single Tor node. This is about sending a message ... run one of these and you are at risk, and when we decide to confiscate your property we're not going to be too careful about what we take. They probably figure that will be enough to keep a bunch of nerds in line.

Trusted Computing can help

[SiliconEntity (448450)]

Tor users should run Trusted Computers. This is a technology that lets remote observers check the software configuration of the system they are connecting to. Most people think it is only for DRM but actually it has many privacy-protecting uses. If a Tor system were a TC, remote Tor clients could check that the Tor server was not logging connections, running a version of Tor with a back door, or doing other things to infringe privacy. Then if you were asked by a court why you didn't add features to your Tor software to log users and such, you could explain that if you did so, remote clients would be able to tell (due to Trusted Computing features) and so they would refuse to connect to your system and refuse to use it. Likewise if you were ordered to run a backdoored version of Tor it would not be effective, because people could see what you were doing.

Ironically, Trusted Computing, hated by the larger Internet community, can actually play an important part in protecting privacy. It is unfortunate that uninformed opposition has slowed the adoption of this potentially very useful and helpful technology. I am working hard to advance Trusted Computing and I can't wait for the day when I can run transparent servers which remote clients will be able to validate and trust. Someday I expect that all Tor servers, anonymous remailers and other privacy protecting technologies will run on Trusted Computers.

I see a lot of knee jerk reaction

[aepervius (535155)]

But did ANY OF YOU read the frigging article ? Let me quote it for you with relevant part in bold.
The police were investigating a bomb threat posted to an online forum for German police officers. The police traced one of the objectionable posts on the forum to the ip address for Janssen's server. Up until his arrest, Alex Janssen's Tor server carried over 40GB of other random strangers' Internet traffic each day. Showing up at his house at midnight on a Sunday night, police cuffed and arrested him in front of his wife and seized his equipment. In a display of both bitter irony and incompetence, the police did not take or shut-down the Tor server responsible for the traffic they were interested in, which was located in a different city, over 500km away. Janssen's attempts to explain what Tor is to the police officers fell initially on deaf ears. After being interrogated for hours, someone from the city of Düsseldorf's equivalent of the Department of Homeland Security showed up and admitted to Janssen that they'd made a mistake. He was released shortly after.

Summary : somebody saw his server was the originator IP, somebody reacted quickly, a bit like the US homeland departement IMO could have done, and fell on the face because 1) they gathered the wrong PC 2) once the dust settled they recognized their error after being interrogated for horus. Not DAYS. Not MONTH. Hours. Sure it sucks but it was a bomb threat, in other word there was urgency, and they did not torture him, they did not water board him and pretend afterward it ain't torture. They interrogated him for hours and released him and admitted mistake.

And people here are taking comparison to loss of liberty and Nazi ? Hellllooo ? Knee jerk reaction ?

Re:Ah Europe, progressive land of freedom

[marcello_dl (667940)]

> Come on, Eurotrolls, what do you have to say now?

Four words:

No Software Patents (yet).

Re:Kind of makes sense.

[chris_eineke (634570)]

So you have illegal traffic coming from your machine

Well, that's not entirely true. He doesn't know if it's 'illegal traffic' or not. Might as well be a Chinese citizen trying to read an American blog about democ.,,, HAHAAHA, I'm sorry. I couldn't write this a straight face. :-P

Re:Kind of makes sense.

[Watson Ladd (955755)]

The US Navy uses Tor to talk to intelligence sources. Chinese dissidents use it to send uncensored news to the west. And criminals can just use botnets. Criminals already have anonymity, it's the rest of us that Tor is designed for.

BUT german laws say

[erlehmann (1045500)]

that someone who is merely routing data is not liable in any form.

for example, "Teledienstgesetz" (translate this as: Telecommunications Act) says

TDG 9
(1) Diensteanbieter sind für fremde Informationen, die sie in einem Kommunikationsnetz übermitteln oder zu denen sie den Zugang zur Nutzung vermitteln, nicht verantwortlich, sofern sie

      1. die Übermittlung nicht veranlasst,
      2. den Adressaten der übermittelten Informationen nicht ausgewählt und
      3. die übermittelten Informationen nicht ausgewählt oder verändert haben.

which boils down to to:

telecommunications providers arent liable for other ppls information, if they
1. didn't initiate the connection,
2. didn't choose the recipients and
3. didn't choose or change the information.

Misquoting Benjamin Franklin

[mi (197448)]

People that trade freedom for security shall recieve neither.

The actual quote, which you failed to attribute, is by Benjamin Franklin and reads:

They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security.

Note the adjectives "essential" and "temporary". To earn the "Insightful" moderations, which the clueless mods have given you already anyway, you must demonstrate, that the given-up liberty is essential, and that the gained security is only temporary.

Can you? I don't think so...

Re:Misquoting Benjamin Franklin

[BillyBlaze (746775)]

Franklin is not placing limits on the types of liberty and security that it's acceptable to trade, but rather making a blanket statement that liberty is essential and security is temporary.

That said: anonymous speech is pretty darn essential. I hope we can agree that free speech is essential, and in the face of governments that happily restrict it, anonymity is a necessary tool to exercise that right without getting imprisoned or killed. And the security we would gain is temporary - if the ter'ists, pedophiles, Holocaust deniers, or pirates are using Tor, and we shut it down, they'll just switch to something else.

Re:Securty vs Freedom

[Original Replica (908688)]

Does anyone recall the French Revolution?

Our leaders, both in the EU and the US, paid careful attention to the lessons learned in the French Revolution, namely that as long as you keep your people well fed and entertained, you can do whatever you damn well please. In the French Revolution, the people storming the Bastille had nothing to lose. But our level of comfort is carefully maintained to keep actual violent revolt from ever happening. Even the poor in our countries have too much to lose (thanks to government programs)to risk anything angrier than waving a slogan on a posterboard sign.

Re:Securty vs Freedom

[Anonymous McCartneyf (1037584)]

You are a brave man.
I gotta warn you, I know of localities where the cops break down doors. If that ever happens in your area, to your door, who are you gonna call? Or do you just plan to break out the ammo?

Re:Securty vs Freedom

[unlametheweak (1102159)]

I gotta warn you, I know of localities where the cops break down doors. If that ever happens in your area, to your door, who are you gonna call?

The most realistic alternative is to call the news media (or anyone you know who has a video camera).

Re:Securty vs Freedom

[z4ckpete (1108053)]

who are you gonna call?

Ghostbusters.

Re:Securty vs Freedom

[Demolition (713476)]

Are you perhaps thinking of the Bolshevik Revolution? On October 25, 1917, a women's battalion tried to defend the Winter Palace against the Red Guards. Upon the battalion's surrender, several of the women were reportedly raped and at least one committed suicide afterwards.

Re:Securty vs Freedom

[mrchaotica (681592)]

Huh? The Roman citizenry never revolted (Rome's various "civil wars" were fights between one rich patrician and another, not large-scale popular uprisings); Rome fell because it was invaded by foreign Gallic and Germanic tribes. All the bread and circuses did was weaken the Empire so that the barbarians had an easier time of it (and then again, they might have invaded regardless, since they were fleeing the Huns).

Re:gestapo

[justin12345 (846440)]

Congratulations! You were the first to Godwin the thread! Here are your lovely prizes...

Ill remember to avoid those groups

[unity100 (970058)]

with that tradition :

There is a tradition in many groups that, once this occurs, that thread is over, and whoever mentioned the Nazis has automatically lost whatever argument was in progress.

nazis are one of the biggest lessons that have happened to mankind. if some bunch of idiots can not realize that there are places that this example should be recalled, then its not worth to waste words with them.