That's a Tor order: Library gets cop visit for running exit relay in US A New England library is calling off its plan to host a Tor exit node after cops, tipped off by the US Department of Homeland Security, paid a visit. The Kilton Library in Lebanon, New Hampshire, had been hosting an exit relay on the Tor network since July as part of a pilot program to safeguard citizens' privacy online. …
> After meeting with the plod, however, the librarians have taken the box offline over fears it was being used for criminal activity.
So, wait a minute.
Plod visits the library and warns them off that their exit node *might* be used for crime and suggests that they shut it down and the library meekly complies.
Wow.
Perhaps they should lock the doors as well because criminals might decide to meet in the library building.
Perhaps they should shut down all their community PCs because criminals might use them for criminal purposes.
Tor – aka The Onion Router
Tor is just Tor. It doesn't stand for anything any more.
It is used by whistleblowers, journalists, activists, crooks and lowlifes. All connections leaving the Tor network go through these exit points, which will inevitably carry a lot of traffic that the Feds will be interested in.
In fact it is used by anybody who wants to. The Feds are interested in e-mail, phone calls, and basically any traffic. Tor is not unique in this regard. One can, like with anything that one doesn't know about, make assumptions about what actual traffic is going through Tor and how much of it is related to illegal activity. Mostly because of the nature of the Tor network, there is no data available on traffic content, though several authors with dubious intent have tried to paint the situation as being whatever their paranoid minds can imagine. They don't, however, have scientific credibility. The Tor network itself is neutral, and that in itself is something that does not sit well with the current government.
is that it must be absolute and indiscriminate in order to be effective, because if it can be broken for one purpose it can be broken for any other. If it can be compromised to catch scammers, paedophiles and terrorists it can be compromised to catch whistleblowers, activists and dissidents. The flip side of that coin of course is that such systems protecting whistleblowers, activists and dissidents will equally protect the aforementioned scammers, paedophiles and terrorists.
There are other ways of identifying and protecting against criminals than tracking them through anonymisation services. Terrorists have to physically plant their bombs in public places and can be observed doing so. Paedophiles will try to lure children to rendezvous points and can be intercepted by operations like Perverted Justice. Police forces around the world will have to develop alternative methods such as these to track criminals, because compromising or suppressing anonymisation services in the name of reducing crime is simply not an acceptable solution.
Indeed "Criminals could be using it!" has always and will always be one of the dumbest arguments for more or less anything.
Caps, bike helmets, cars, motorcycles, shoes, clothes, coffee, lighters, baseball bats, etc... oh lets not forget money.
Pretty sure everything could have some kind of duel use.
.. is that it is at present synonymous with 'unaccountable".
I frequently go through my 404 logs when people try to reach my site's admin login (which doesn't live at its default place, it's the first thing I change on a setup), and look up the IP addresses of especially the volume offenders (multiple hits in seconds, so running a script). I have seen a clear increase in the use of Tor for hacking attempts :(.
Firstly, the library hasn't backed down (yet) - they've just sent it back to their Trustees (who are probably the group that would face any legal difficulties). Seems perfectly reasonable - if I were just some random employee then that's totally what I would do too.
Secondly, is there the option of hosting the node but only allowing the exit to see the library hosted content? That should resolve the issue, right? TOR users wherever they are can get to the library content but nowhere else (via the Library node). So no "criminal" traffic can be passing through the libraries systems onto the internet. Or do you think they are arguing that even passing the encrypted TOR in/out stream, which I guess might contain a few instances of naughtiness, is a problem?
> Secondly, is there the option of hosting the node but only allowing the exit to see the library hosted content?
To be honest, despite the downvotes, this is a serious question.
I know censorship is a bad thing, but if you're hosting a Tor exit node, there are some reasonable precautions that you could take against the obvious problems of underage porn trafficing and suchlike.
Perhaps they could whitelist the kinds of sites that dissidents might be interested in, information sites like Wikipedia, YouTube, the kinds of things that are regularly cracked down by foreign dissent-hating governments.
Ban the local police from being the running-dog lackeys of the Federal government. We have some historical evidence to suggest that doesn't work out well for ordinary citizens.
Of course the real problem is that we'd like police departments to exercise critical thinking and conduct themselves in a manner conducive to preserving the civil rights of the people in their jurisdiction. And some do. But far too many do not.
Is anyone actually arguing that Tor isn't being used to mask illegal activity? If so I'd so those people need to have the stupidity slapped out of them. Now if they're arguing that Tor isn't JUST being used to mask illegal activity, or even that it's not primarily being used to mask illegal activity, that I could understand. Perhaps not agree with, but understand. But to deny that Tor is the home of everything from kiddie porn to hire-a-hitman sites is just idiotic.
Tor is just a communication technology.
Same as the mobile phones that are used to detonate explosives.
Same as normal phones used to run criminal enterprises.
Assassinations have been prevalent for millenia...
The sess pit of this world that holds those that would exploit children has always existed.
We are just now hearing about the 1970's abuse, because there was no Tor then, right?
P.
sess pit
Conventionally "cesspit" - one word, spelled with a C.
That said, etymologically it ought to be spelled with an S, as its root was in Middle English. It's a cognate of e.g. "suspire" - presumably a reference to the outgassing of bacteria digesting sewage.
"It is used by whistleblowers, journalists, activists, crooks and lowlifes"
Venn diagram please.
Also, does no-one else see the discrepancy with the cops using Silk Road as an argument against Tor?
How can they moan about Tor anonymizing stuff when they managed to shut it down and catch a few crooks - kind of undermines the FUD a bit.
Well we still don't *know* if the Govt was being *honest* in the Silk Road case, about how they found the servers...
To be fair, we never know that the government is being honest about anything.
Or that anyone else is, for that matter.
Psychology and phenomenology will claim (with good reason) that you can't even tell whether you're being honest with yourself. The best we can ever do is try our best to estimate the probability that a claim doesn't contradict the world.
That's what infuriated me about one of the UK's kneejerk responses, outlawing supplying "anything useful to terrorists" - which would appear to include selling them lunch, a biro and notepad or a map of the UK motorways. Of course, we have to trust that they will really only use this absurdly broad power for good reasons ... right?
Yes, with an *anonymous* relay service, there's a risk that as well as the incriminating financial records that prove someone's been cooking the books at some big company as they get leaked to the NYT, you're relaying some dirty old man's child abuse material, a college student's bootleg copy of Adobe Creative Suite, a high school student's MP3s and Al Qaeda's latest operational plans - that's pretty much what the anonymous bit means.
Governments had the sense to understand this decades ago for postal and package services with "common carrier" laws: when someone is transporting a parcel from A to B, you can't expect them to know if it contains books, drugs or a parcel bomb, so you can't blame them for whatever it is. Sadly, it seems that level of common sense has become extinct in governments now...
The library in question (the Kilton Library in Lebanon, NH) held a public meeting in which residents *overwhelmingly* supported the Tor node in the library. Following the meeting, the library trustees voted to bring the node back up, and it is still running. The node name is "LebLibraries".
https://www.vice.com/en/article/yp3dzm/these-public-comments-saved-a-librarys-tor-server-from-a-government-shutdown
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/09/16/440848324/n-h-public-library-resumes-its-support-of-tor-network
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
