Facebook Plunges Again
Tumblr 101: Tips And Tricks To Get Started
TOR servers seized by German officials
The Onion Router (TOR) provides anonymous web-surfing and privacy online and is a free download. The German authorities seized several TOR servers in in effort to crack down on a child porn ring. While I despise and oppose anyone involved in the despicable practice of child porn, I do feel for those whose servers were taken, since it seems that they are not to blame for this, but others using the TOR-circuit to hide their identity. It should not be assumed that anyone trying to "hide" their identity is a criminal, which the German authorities haven't done...yet. We'll see how this case plays out, but it looks as if the police will not press charges to server owners and users, unless they find conclusive evidence against a certain person.
[Via Slashdot]
Comments
6
Subscribe to commentsJimSep 12th 2006 9:34AM
Bad Bad Bad Bad. On the other hand, it was probably a matter of time. Police are going to get frustrated, even in less repressive countries, with criminals using anonymizing systems. Hopefully incidents like this are a bump to be expected, teething pains as everyone adjusts to new things, rather than the end of anything. My $0.02, the other 98 are on my blog.
Here's wishing you the best of luck,
Sometime EU Citizen
markSep 12th 2006 12:20PM
this is bad people. i case you havn't noticed. we no longer have the right to privacy.
secret wars, secret laws, secret tribunals(which is a court with no jury)...
what's to stop germany from handing over all that data to your local government. or even better SELL that information to them, after all they HAVE everything else about you but, shh! it's a secret!
vaporSep 12th 2006 12:37PM
We live in a different world now. There's a lot of talk about privacy and pesonal liberties. Yeah, yeah, yeah. If the gov't wants to look at my email or listen to my phone calls, I hope they have a great time. I don't see why this would concern anyone unless they've got something to hide.
The way I look at it, if these sort of things prevent a terrorist from hurting any of my countrymen or some pervert from hurting a child, I'm for it.
Shava NeradSep 12th 2006 3:41PM
We have a full statement at http://tor.eff.org/ and you can check the story from boingboing yesterday. This is not as serious as slashdot made it out to be. CSO Magazine published a statement from the German police that Tor was not the target of the investigation.
It's very sad for the server operators, but I think everyone will be fine, personally.
Shava Nerad
executive director
The Tor Project
FabianSep 13th 2006 2:20AM
It's really not as bad as it sounds. The police hopes to find logs and traces on the confiscated computers. The owners of the servers are not charged with anything. They - or rather their servers - are considered witnesses.
KeevesSep 13th 2006 4:59AM
I can understand how these provacy-protection things work and all, however, as this case proves, am skeptical about whether they actually would work in making your internet surfing more privet.
Raids on these sorts of companies are inevitable, and whilst you may have not been noticed if you'd been using the internet like anyone else (unprotected), by signing up with a company like this you have added yourself to a list of criminals, and the question would always be there of why you would go to such extremes to make yourself "private".
I'm against the idea of allowing limited groups of people access to "private" internet anyway. Why should criminals etc search the internet in private, when everyone else is unprotected. Either everyone should have this level of privacy (in one big free-for-all), or companies which harbor criminals, or allow criminals to operate without checking, should be shut down.
I suppose one 'good' thing about this company tho is that they are cooperating with police, however doesn't that completely take the 'privacy' element of the program away, since now police may have access to the records of all the users...