People who support the Tor network despite the threat of imprisonment
The names were changed at the request of Richard, who did not want people associating Tor with child pornography and the arms trade to pour out their anger on him.
Richard had a long drive ahead. An hour ago, at half past five in the morning, his wife called him, Lisa. “The house is full,” she said in a low but strained voice. Richard, having just woken up and trying to grasp the bell, thought that there must have been a water leak in the basement.
Instead, the wife explained that the house was overflowing with FBI agents and they all wanted to talk to him. “Okay, I'm leaving,” said Richard. He got dressed, took a laptop with a phone (FBI requirement), and went out into the night. A trip along the highway from Milwaukee, where he worked as a programmer, in his native Indianapolis will take at least five hours - there is time to think about what this is all about.
')
Lisa said that it is connected with computers. The only thing Richard could come up with was his connection to the output Tor node.
The Tor network, which was originally funded by the US Navy, is a network of servers, large and small, distributed throughout the world. By connecting to the network, the user sends his traffic through random servers, at the same time hiding it under encryption layers, which makes it almost impossible to track who does what on the network.
Dissidents can communicate in secret, citizens can bypass government censorship, criminals sell drugs and distribute child pornography. There are also hidden services, part of the so-called. dark network. They allow site owners and their users to remain anonymous.
The final set of servers is called "output nodes" because it is on them that the traffic leaves the Tor network and flows into the normal Internet.
These nodes are supported by ordinary volunteers, or "operators." Large exits are held by several organizations, universities and lone activists have them. They say that was the same with Edward Snowden.
Richard was one of these operators. And although Richard, 57, suggested that the call was related to him, he did not know what the FBI was investigating.
“Caught child pornography distributors?” Hackers are attacking? The threat of an explosion? I didn’t know what it was about, ”Richard told me later by phone.
When using Tor, your ip-address becomes the address of the output node that you randomly assign. If someone sends a threat or spam by mail, then the competent authorities will have an output node ip. Therefore, the Richard knot could be mixed up in anything.
Kurt Opsal, Assistant Chief Consultant at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), believes that supporting the exit site is a legitimate matter, at least under US law.
But, if the operator has installed the exit node at home on his Internet connection, it may be confused with the source of traffic. This can lead to a police raid on a house, even though the legality of supporting the exit node.
For this and other reasons, operators are advised to run nodes remotely from rented servers. Richard did just that. Registered through a company in St. Louis, its hub worked in a German data center for 18 months. But apparently, this did not stop the police. The FBI received an order to search for malicious programs, programs for hacking, etc.
Meanwhile, the agents interrogated Lisa. Why did the family rent so many cars? Why did Richard rent so many computers? Lisa, as the seller of 3Com, easily answered the technical questions of the agents.
The raid began before dawn. Agents rolled up on eight cars, broke into the house and flooded it, checking for "security." And only after that they were allowed to turn on the coffee pot. After them, a team of computer scientists got into the house, looking for evidence of hacking into other computers, theft of trade secrets or a plot to do so.
The experts took the home server and the desktop - both computers were working on Linux. Two other computers, with Windows, for some reason left. The agents searched the house, looked behind the pictures. Richard later learned that his office was also crushed during the search.
This was not the first time that law enforcement officers visited the site operator.
In 2013, William Weber, an Austrian admin, met the police, who confiscated 20 computers, gaming consoles and other devices from him - because child pornography passed through one of his exit sites.
The following year, he was found guilty of spreading it. He could not appeal because he had spent all the money on the courts. Weber argued that before that he had already received threats of extradition, and the police questioned his friends and colleagues.
In Germany, Alex Janssen decided to close the exit node after the police searched him twice. After that, he wrote in his blog: “I can no longer do this, my wife and I are scared to death. Here ends my civil courage. I will support the Tor project, but I will not keep the output node anymore. ”
It is not known how many operators were subject to increased attention from the police, since often these cases did not receive publicity. Sometimes the police did not come. but the server was turned off or confiscated at the request of the police.
This month, another operator claimed that he received a court request to track down the user who used his outgoing node - although he, of course, was not able to do so.
Another step to secure node ownership, in addition to remote server management, is to join operators to the organization, as recommended by the Tor Project members.
Moritz Bartle, who has supported weekend nodes since 2006, leads a team that supports a dozen different organizations that hold their weekend nodes. The Torservers.net group deals with all complaints to its members and reimburses part of the losses to the operators. Bartl says there are not too many complaints - they are mostly related to piracy.
“About once a month a request comes in from the police. We answer that we don’t have user data, and we don’t have the right to collect this data, and even if we did collect it, they wouldn’t have a technical sense. ”
"In total, I received about 50 requests from the DMCA, 20 complaints and not a single visit from the feds," Lewman from the Tor Project team wrote in 2008. True, now it does not contain output nodes.
And the FBI inquiries continued. Agents asked why Richard was interested in the Houston Astros baseball team. Lisa replied that he was not interested and did not watch sports on TV at all.
Wife called Richard again and reported that the FBI raid was somehow connected to the Houston Astros team. More precisely, agents were looking for evidence of a team’s penetration into the computer network, email, and a database. Richard was amazed because he never dealt with hacking sites.
When asked about the reasons for raising the exit node, Richard responded that he was motivated by a sense of guilt. “My concern about general surveillance was constantly growing, and then I got a job, and it turned out that we were doing work for the NSA.”
That was 3 years ago - before Snowden published the materials on mass surveillance that was conducted by the NSA in the USA, and the Five Eyes system in Britain, New Zealand, Canada and Australia. And even before these events, it was known that the NSA has secret rooms in AT & T buildings, and that George W. Bush gave permission for wiretapping without a warrant after the events of September 11.
White, a UK site operator, had a different motivation for this: he wanted to pay back the Tor network for the services. “I've been using Tor since 2008. It seems to me that after many years of using the network, I was obliged to repay it. We need people who play the role of the backbone of the network, do not do dubious things and protect network users. ”
When the FBI found out everything they wanted, they left the house and called Richard to invite him to their local office for interrogation.
“At the interview, agents asked why I rented a server and what was my motivation. Why did I choose Germany? To avoid the ministers of law accessing it? ”I explained that in Europe traffic was simply cheaper.
“The agent in Houston did not understand the subject. It seemed that he took several lessons on a technical topic, and was not a technology expert who entered law enforcement agencies, ”said Richard.
But Lewman of the Tor Project says the FBI knows a lot about Tor's work.
“The FBI read the source code a lot,” says Lewman. The project was studied by many law enforcement agencies, including, they figured out how to use it for their own purposes.
According to Lewman, of course, it is impossible to completely exclude the possibility of such raids. Sometimes it is decided by individual units, sometimes it’s just window dressing and a show of force. And sometimes, as Lewman says, the operators themselves may not be as clean as they themselves say.
Today, the Richard site works — it transmits chats, photos, and perhaps less legitimate content from around the world. “If the video from ISIS is transmitted through my site, I don’t feel guilty for their murders,” he says.
Opsal from the EFF believes that the lack of operator responsibility for node traffic should be legalized. "It seems to me extremely important for the work of the Internet and for freedom of expression online, so that providers do not have to be responsible for the actions of their users." This should be applied to Internet providers, hosters and Tor operators.
Richard does not expect anything out of this official case, because his IP address is listed on the Tor public exit list. However, "the experience of invading a house of armed people who threaten you is quite traumatic." He agrees on the need to investigate the owner of the server, which is seen in the hacking, but this does not mean that you need to break into houses.
“It was completely unwise for them to report to the house at night, in bullet-proof vests and with weapons as part of the investigation of a crime in which no one was killed,” Richard says. Since our last conversation, no one has ever called him again. But they didn’t return computers to him either. “I allow people to communicate and exchange ideas. I think I shouldn’t apologize for that. ”
Richard had a long drive ahead. An hour ago, at half past five in the morning, his wife called him, Lisa. “The house is full,” she said in a low but strained voice. Richard, having just woken up and trying to grasp the bell, thought that there must have been a water leak in the basement.
Instead, the wife explained that the house was overflowing with FBI agents and they all wanted to talk to him. “Okay, I'm leaving,” said Richard. He got dressed, took a laptop with a phone (FBI requirement), and went out into the night. A trip along the highway from Milwaukee, where he worked as a programmer, in his native Indianapolis will take at least five hours - there is time to think about what this is all about.
')
Lisa said that it is connected with computers. The only thing Richard could come up with was his connection to the output Tor node.
The Tor network, which was originally funded by the US Navy, is a network of servers, large and small, distributed throughout the world. By connecting to the network, the user sends his traffic through random servers, at the same time hiding it under encryption layers, which makes it almost impossible to track who does what on the network.
Dissidents can communicate in secret, citizens can bypass government censorship, criminals sell drugs and distribute child pornography. There are also hidden services, part of the so-called. dark network. They allow site owners and their users to remain anonymous.
The final set of servers is called "output nodes" because it is on them that the traffic leaves the Tor network and flows into the normal Internet.
These nodes are supported by ordinary volunteers, or "operators." Large exits are held by several organizations, universities and lone activists have them. They say that was the same with Edward Snowden.
Richard was one of these operators. And although Richard, 57, suggested that the call was related to him, he did not know what the FBI was investigating.
“Caught child pornography distributors?” Hackers are attacking? The threat of an explosion? I didn’t know what it was about, ”Richard told me later by phone.
When using Tor, your ip-address becomes the address of the output node that you randomly assign. If someone sends a threat or spam by mail, then the competent authorities will have an output node ip. Therefore, the Richard knot could be mixed up in anything.
Kurt Opsal, Assistant Chief Consultant at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), believes that supporting the exit site is a legitimate matter, at least under US law.
But, if the operator has installed the exit node at home on his Internet connection, it may be confused with the source of traffic. This can lead to a police raid on a house, even though the legality of supporting the exit node.
For this and other reasons, operators are advised to run nodes remotely from rented servers. Richard did just that. Registered through a company in St. Louis, its hub worked in a German data center for 18 months. But apparently, this did not stop the police. The FBI received an order to search for malicious programs, programs for hacking, etc.
Meanwhile, the agents interrogated Lisa. Why did the family rent so many cars? Why did Richard rent so many computers? Lisa, as the seller of 3Com, easily answered the technical questions of the agents.
The raid began before dawn. Agents rolled up on eight cars, broke into the house and flooded it, checking for "security." And only after that they were allowed to turn on the coffee pot. After them, a team of computer scientists got into the house, looking for evidence of hacking into other computers, theft of trade secrets or a plot to do so.
The experts took the home server and the desktop - both computers were working on Linux. Two other computers, with Windows, for some reason left. The agents searched the house, looked behind the pictures. Richard later learned that his office was also crushed during the search.
This was not the first time that law enforcement officers visited the site operator.
In 2013, William Weber, an Austrian admin, met the police, who confiscated 20 computers, gaming consoles and other devices from him - because child pornography passed through one of his exit sites.
The following year, he was found guilty of spreading it. He could not appeal because he had spent all the money on the courts. Weber argued that before that he had already received threats of extradition, and the police questioned his friends and colleagues.
In Germany, Alex Janssen decided to close the exit node after the police searched him twice. After that, he wrote in his blog: “I can no longer do this, my wife and I are scared to death. Here ends my civil courage. I will support the Tor project, but I will not keep the output node anymore. ”
It is not known how many operators were subject to increased attention from the police, since often these cases did not receive publicity. Sometimes the police did not come. but the server was turned off or confiscated at the request of the police.
This month, another operator claimed that he received a court request to track down the user who used his outgoing node - although he, of course, was not able to do so.
Another step to secure node ownership, in addition to remote server management, is to join operators to the organization, as recommended by the Tor Project members.
Moritz Bartle, who has supported weekend nodes since 2006, leads a team that supports a dozen different organizations that hold their weekend nodes. The Torservers.net group deals with all complaints to its members and reimburses part of the losses to the operators. Bartl says there are not too many complaints - they are mostly related to piracy.
“About once a month a request comes in from the police. We answer that we don’t have user data, and we don’t have the right to collect this data, and even if we did collect it, they wouldn’t have a technical sense. ”
"In total, I received about 50 requests from the DMCA, 20 complaints and not a single visit from the feds," Lewman from the Tor Project team wrote in 2008. True, now it does not contain output nodes.
And the FBI inquiries continued. Agents asked why Richard was interested in the Houston Astros baseball team. Lisa replied that he was not interested and did not watch sports on TV at all.
Wife called Richard again and reported that the FBI raid was somehow connected to the Houston Astros team. More precisely, agents were looking for evidence of a team’s penetration into the computer network, email, and a database. Richard was amazed because he never dealt with hacking sites.
When asked about the reasons for raising the exit node, Richard responded that he was motivated by a sense of guilt. “My concern about general surveillance was constantly growing, and then I got a job, and it turned out that we were doing work for the NSA.”
That was 3 years ago - before Snowden published the materials on mass surveillance that was conducted by the NSA in the USA, and the Five Eyes system in Britain, New Zealand, Canada and Australia. And even before these events, it was known that the NSA has secret rooms in AT & T buildings, and that George W. Bush gave permission for wiretapping without a warrant after the events of September 11.
White, a UK site operator, had a different motivation for this: he wanted to pay back the Tor network for the services. “I've been using Tor since 2008. It seems to me that after many years of using the network, I was obliged to repay it. We need people who play the role of the backbone of the network, do not do dubious things and protect network users. ”
When the FBI found out everything they wanted, they left the house and called Richard to invite him to their local office for interrogation.
“At the interview, agents asked why I rented a server and what was my motivation. Why did I choose Germany? To avoid the ministers of law accessing it? ”I explained that in Europe traffic was simply cheaper.
“The agent in Houston did not understand the subject. It seemed that he took several lessons on a technical topic, and was not a technology expert who entered law enforcement agencies, ”said Richard.
But Lewman of the Tor Project says the FBI knows a lot about Tor's work.
“The FBI read the source code a lot,” says Lewman. The project was studied by many law enforcement agencies, including, they figured out how to use it for their own purposes.
According to Lewman, of course, it is impossible to completely exclude the possibility of such raids. Sometimes it is decided by individual units, sometimes it’s just window dressing and a show of force. And sometimes, as Lewman says, the operators themselves may not be as clean as they themselves say.
Today, the Richard site works — it transmits chats, photos, and perhaps less legitimate content from around the world. “If the video from ISIS is transmitted through my site, I don’t feel guilty for their murders,” he says.
Opsal from the EFF believes that the lack of operator responsibility for node traffic should be legalized. "It seems to me extremely important for the work of the Internet and for freedom of expression online, so that providers do not have to be responsible for the actions of their users." This should be applied to Internet providers, hosters and Tor operators.
Richard does not expect anything out of this official case, because his IP address is listed on the Tor public exit list. However, "the experience of invading a house of armed people who threaten you is quite traumatic." He agrees on the need to investigate the owner of the server, which is seen in the hacking, but this does not mean that you need to break into houses.
“It was completely unwise for them to report to the house at night, in bullet-proof vests and with weapons as part of the investigation of a crime in which no one was killed,” Richard says. Since our last conversation, no one has ever called him again. But they didn’t return computers to him either. “I allow people to communicate and exchange ideas. I think I shouldn’t apologize for that. ”
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/356730/
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