No, you misunderstood. My point is that someone else's child porn is going through your computer when you operate a tor exit node - that isn't the case when you just use encryption and transfer it yourself.
Also UPS maintains logs of who sends and receives stuff, so they can easily track down anyone sending child porn or whatever through their service.
The big difference is ISPs keep track of users' ip addresses and they give that information to the police when they get a warrant. tor doesn't keep that information, so basically the exit node is all that the police have. The trail stops at the person running the tor node. Likely the police won't find the actual perv here, but you can't blame them for trying.
Maybe you should stop spreading misinformation then: ISPs are not generally required to log IPs, neither on global scale, nor on European scale, nor on Austrian scale. The last two ISPs I've used, for example, were both exempted from the recently passed data retention law.
The irony is that the raided guy owns an ISP himself that (as far as I know) wouldn't be required to log IPs. If the data would have been distributed directly over that equipment, he would not be liable. Even if I'm wrong and he would have been required to keep logs and didn't, he could only be charged with that particular offense. But since the traffic went over Tor he is now at risk to getting his life ruined.
A surprising amount of people seem to be just flat out defending child pornography itself, actually. The fact that everyone talks about it so nonchalant is frightening.
People seem to care more about this guy's life being ruined than all the kids' lives ruined.
If people are so worried about the "kids' lives ruined" maybe people should be more angry when real, high level, child abuse rings are exposed, then the police that expose them are fired, and the politicians and royalty associated with the perpetrators cover it all up. One example from Europe: The Marc Dutroux case. Another example from the US: The Franklin Coverup.
The real child pedo rings, the ones that are the real danger, are composed of powerful people who work in corporations, levels of government, the judiciary, and royalty. As they say, this one goes right to the top.
Sorry to ruin your day, but the global pedo ring will never be stopped until the the system allows powerful and connected perpetrators to be prosecuted. Busting some ISP Tor supporter, guilty or not, is going to do nothing to the real global child crime networks.
Your post is a disgusting appeal to emotion, and a useless one at that. "Think of the children!". What would you have us do? Crucify this guy who may not be guilty of anything but protecting free speech?
You can go on spouting your nonsense about Tor just being for CP and downloading media, but the internet is getting more and more censored every day. Someone went to jail in India for clicking "like" on a post that spoke out against a politicians. How long until this comes to your country? Things like Tor are the only thing that will keep the internet free over the long term, if it can be done at all.
But no, let's just shut the whole thing down and go back to smoke signals because some asshole out there might otherwise see a picture of a naked kid that was taken 20 years ago.
The civil liberties encroachments perpetrated in the guise of "stopping child porn" do a hell of a lot more damage to a hell of a lot more people than all the child porn ever produced.
I honestly can't tell if you're being serious or not. I'd like to know how you measure the damage done to a child who is raped on film, much less all of them. "A lot more damage"...
I guess you're right though. Children being victimized is a small price to pay for free movies on bittorrent.
The real screwed up part about all this is the fact that naming of bills has you somehow convinced that child pornography isn't a big deal. You think it's about jerking off to a picture?? That's sickening.
The fact that some politician out there has tried to push a bill that he shouldn't under the guise of protecting children has NOTHING to do with a raid on a Tor operator here.
>has you somehow convinced that child pornography isn't a big deal
How the hell did you draw that conclusion? Where did I say it wasn't a big deal? I said that civil liberties are a bigger deal than child abuse (which is a statement I absolutely stand by) for a couple of reasons.
First, you'll never get back a lost right whether that be privacy or freedom of speech or bearing arms or what have you - once its gone, it takes a revolution to claw it back. And the fact that government overreach is usually passed in the guise of flag or child safety makes losing civil liberties a real threat that deserves to be objectively evaluated.
Second, a child that's been molested will grow up with some serious issues, granted - then they become an adult with fewer rights than their grandparents, ostensibly to protect other children. If you're following along at home and want to count the injustices, overreach + abuse is worse than abuse alone.
>The fact that some politician out there has tried to push a bill that he shouldn't under the guise of protecting children has NOTHING to do with a raid on a Tor operator here.
Except for the fact that it's "some politician" or "some detective" following their emotions when enforcing the law instead of following common sense which causes these bad raids in the first place. An exit node is a public service used by other people. You don't fucking seize someone's means of communicating (and very potentially livelihood) with that knowledge in mind. It's shoddy police work at the absolute least, and downright malicious (great way to discourage Tor nodes) at worst.
How about you answer the question I asked you in the other post? Are you willing to silence an undefined number of innocent people to make a failed attempt at banning the transfer of data (not the abuse of children, which will continue even if the internet were to go away tomorrow)?
Make sure you understand that, please, even if you disagree with everything else I've said here. Even if you go full reductio ad absurdum, raiding every person on this planet who has ever downloaded an image of child abuse still isn't going to stop child abuse. With that knowledge in mind, you should ideally take a more balanced look at the law and its unintended consequences.
You downplayed child pornography as just someone "jerking off to a picture." So yes, you apparently don't see the other consequences of it, and don't think it's a big deal. That's what you don't seem to understand: It's not the 'transfer of data'. Abuse of children might still happen, but this promotes it. You're creating a 'market' for it, where as before it might not have existed.
Now, would I get rid of the internet if it meant getting rid of Child Pornography? Obviously not. I wouldn't get rid of handguns if it meant attempting to stop murder in the United States as well.
Here's the issue with your outlook: You act as though it is one or the other. You must take down the internet entirely or you must allow all child pornography to flow freely through your computer. Your outlook on the law isn't balanced at all. You won't give up any civil liberties because you feel you shouldn't compromise on it.
> Abuse of children might still happen, but this promotes it. You're creating a 'market' for it, where as before it might not have existed.
Supply emerges to meet demand. There are people out there who want child porn, and others who provide it to them.
Governments clamping down on Tor exit nodes doesn't affect that demand, but it does have a harmful effect on our means of private communication online.
There's practically no privacy left on the Internet anymore. Everything we do is logged and analyzed somewhere somehow (Google, Facebook, NSA, local ISPs and governments etc), and we're being gradually stripped of our rights everywhere.
It really is important that there's at least some privacy-providing tool available to all of us online. Child porn being transferred through the same tool is not really even a "price to pay" for that privacy, because as long as there is demand, it will get transferred somehow in any case.
>It's not the 'transfer of data'. Abuse of children might still happen, but this promotes it. You're creating a 'market' for it, where as before it might not have existed.
Downloading (not buying) CP doesn't facilitate its production anymore than downloading a blockbuster movie facilitates its production.
>You won't give up any civil liberties because you feel you shouldn't compromise on it.
You think I should? How and why? You seem to think that curtailing the use of an anonymous communications tool because evil people use it is a reasonable solution, and I think that's preposterous.
Oh really? Why don't you tell me exactly what is you won't give up to stop the rape of a child. Go ahead. And none of this "civil liberties" cop out. Give me a specific thing you could do with Tor that you can't otherwise that is worth more to you than stopping the molestation of children.
Me? Personally? I don't have a use for Tor. (Yet.) I can't speak for any other user though. I've never had some information that I wanted to get out that could get me in serious trouble or needed to access some information my government deemed punishable for accessing. I haven't ever required anonymity beyond what a simple proxy can provide.
What about people in oppressive regimes? China? Korea? Various middle east countries? Do you really think you can speak for every user in the world?
More importantly, are you ready to silence an unknowable amount of people to prevent people from jerking off to a picture? Do you really think that if some AI was spun up tomorrow that could completely erase child porn from the internet transparently, that children would stop being abused?
I like how you handwave "civil liberties" too. Really if you're a user of this site you should be well aware of the expansions of government power attempted and passed in the cloak of "stopping the molestation of children" (which is a bit like stopping piracy actually, in that both are endless battles that can't be won).
Want to drastically curtail civil liberties or give police a ton of power? Name your bill the "anti child abuse and pornography prevention act" or similar and it becomes untouchable.
But one can "blame them for trying" because they know, as you pointed out, "likely they won't find the actual perv".
Many police use Tor on a day-to-day basis in their investigations. It's just as useful for the police to need anonymity as it is anyone else. Tor provides an easy-to-use system to identify the exit nodes.
It's up to the user to prove that the child porn isn't on his computer. As someone pointed out earlier, you could just download a bunch of child porn with a tor exit node running on your computer and say it was someone else.
No, not exactly. Perhaps I didn't word it correctly. A crime has been committed using the user's internet connection, so in most civilized countries (i.e. places I would like to live in), that means the police have the legal and moral right to investigate that crime. Until proven otherwise, the 'tor' user is a suspect - watch a few episodes of CSI if you want to get a rough idea how it works.
> A crime has been committed using the user's internet connection, so in most civilized countries (i.e. places I would like to live in), that means the police have the legal and moral right to investigate that crime.
I agree so far.
> Until proven otherwise, the 'tor' user [operator?] is a suspect
The burden of proof lies with the police, not with the suspect. If the police fails to come up with reasonable evidence, the operator is to be acquitted, furthermore the operator has to do nothing to aid the police. It's definitely not up to him to prove the child porn isn't on his computer.
This is an important point. Consider what happens if the seized hard drives were encrypted (I don't know whether this is the case). Then it's virtually impossible for the police to prove that the operator was downloading the data himself. The operator on the other hand is not required to give up his passwords. In the end it all comes down to the question of whether relaying data via Tor is in itself enough to constitute an offense. And this is the question we all care about so much, because it will have implications for all exit node operators in the area.
> watch a few episodes of CSI if you want to get a rough idea how it works.
Or UPS for that matter.