Comment by maeln
14 hours ago
In many countries, running an exit node is a very fast way to have cop knocking at your door and seizing all your stuff. To run a tor exit node, you either have to try your best to stay anonymous, preferably be based in a country who don't care at all about cyber crime, and run them on a dodgy hosting provider who dgaf. Or you have to create a legal entity, either a non-profit or a company, depending on the country register as a hosting provider (so that you are not consider legally responsible for what comes out of your server if you abide by some rules), and you will still have to respond pretty fast to any police inquiry.
If anything, it's a miracle that there is 3000 of them. Although you can safely assume that a good portion of them (if not the majority) are operated by state intelligence services, cybersecurity companies and bad actor, who will log everything that pass through their node (and might be able to decrypt them one day).
This somewhat begs the question. I know some smart tvs are sold cheap because they are secretly used in botnets. By multiple bad actors independently even, it's enough common of a strategy.
How come no one has done that for the dark web? That we know of at least? It would be incredibly annoying for cops to suddenly go knocking on 15 thousand doors of completely random people.
agree I think tor is such a cool technology but even the thought of what is getting routed through there on my machine or even a machine I rent is enough for me to stay away from it
I watched Adrian Crendshaw's DefCon talk about how people got busted using Tor and have also stayed away since then. I have used it in conjunction with TAILS a few times, but other than that, I don't mess with it any more.
DEF CON 22 - Adrian Crenshaw- Dropping Docs on Darknets: How People Got Caught
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQ2OZKitRwc
Same thought for me with Freenet about 15 years ago.
I liked the idea of it, especially since it was a time where ISPs were really cracking down on BitTorrents. But after seeing a few index sites inside the network, I quickly realized how much of that network was CSAM.
Deleted that and never looked back.
You don't route anything by default, you have to explicitly enable it if you wish to help the network.
And relay operators (not exit nodes) don't face any issues. Don't let the unreasonable fear blind you.
I once worked at a very pro-hacker firm (USA) - our CTO, good as he was, once tried to migrate our Ubuntu based servers to BSD, this being a very high tier performance oriented HFT firm, purely on his love of the distro.
A good dozen engineers in a team of 50 ran relays, one bold fool ran an exit node and was falsely fingered for CSAM type crimes during my tenure. The net effect was no one ran relays anymore. The poor exit operator remains an Irish to this day because he has dozens of headlines about his arrest and none about the dropped charges.
At least here in Germany I believe you’re on very shaky legal ground even if you’re just running a relay.
US government literally has a gigantic data centre purely for the purpose of storing encrypted data traffic that might be decoded one day. We can only assume that anything going through any US controlled TOR node ends up there.