William Weber, a LowEndTalk member, was raided by Austrian police in 2012 for operating a Tor exit node that was allegedly used to distribute child pornography. While he was not arrested, many of his computers and devices were confiscated. He was later found guilty of supporting the distribution of child pornography through his Tor exit node, though he claims it was unintentional and he was simply supporting free speech and anonymity. He was given a 5 year probation sentence but left Austria shortly after. Though some articles portray him negatively, it is debatable whether he intentionally supported child pornography distribution or simply operated in the legal grey area of Tor exit nodes.
We oughtta arrest the people who pave roads because human traffickers use them to commit crimes.
I wonder if the ISP got charged as well lol
The charges usually end up falling onto the last one who can’t stick them onto someone else.
Like, a carrier can blame the ISP, who can blame the VPN, who can check its logs and blame an address owner, who… better keep their own logs capable of identifying someone else if they’re letting random people do random stuff using that address. And a good lawyer, and will and money to fight it.
Reading the article, it’s not just distributed CP. Someone also used his Tor Exit to hack into a NATO facility in Poland that dealt in chemical/biological weapons. Like, yeeesh.
This “someone” sounds an awful lot like a nation-state actor.
Yikes 😬
I’m surprised this doesn’t happen more often. Home routers are trivial to compromise, and compromised home routers can also be used to distribute illegal content.
Btw, what’s the current judicial status of exit nodes around the world? Why was he charged, yet the isp wasn’t? Would the isp be charged if it ran a similar exit node, or is it strictly because it was a private entity?
Rule of thumb: You get the blame.
TL;DR: Ask a lawyer.
You can compare them to VPNs for the severity of restrictions (in 2020):
For some more historical info, there is this list on Wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tor_(network)#Reception,_impact,_and_legislation
For a more US-centric FAQ, you can check: https://community.torproject.org/relay/community-resources/eff-tor-legal-faq/
Still, most countries don’t like random people to let other unidentified random people to do random stuff, most police officers are ill equipped or educated to deal with it, legislation hasn’t been tested in most places, and you’re running a hard to define, changing, and sometimes random level of risk.
we should have separate dark web(no CP) and dark web(CP)
How would that possibly work?
Shouldn’t all social media, ISPs, Apple, Google, etc also be found guilty of the same crime then? What about CDN?
This is equivalent to a criminal running into a crowd to get away from police, and the police just stopping, arresting, and charging the first person in the crowd that they see for not doing anything to stop them.
