from Hacker News

Man found guilty of child porn because he ran a Tor exit node

by h0ek on 7/23/23, 5:03 PM with 554 comments

by schroeding on 7/23/23, 5:19 PM
Wow, the website of his hosting company[1] is, eh, extremly honest:
> Further, as Kosovo is an extremely corrupt country, we are able to bribe both executive and judicative as well as getting information about court orders and raids before execution, enabling us to move servers out of the affected location, protecting our clients in any situation. Our excellent Serbian connections enable us to also move servers cross-border and play "ping pong" between both countries, essentially keeping content online forever.
[1] https://basehost.eu/
by onetimeusename on 7/23/23, 6:06 PM
Someone used the same exit to hack a NATO facility in Poland, which deals with chemical and biological weapons. Disarming, etc.
The US tried to extradite me from Croatia in 2017, with not much more info than national security.
They lost their case as I am married to a local and cannot be extradited outside the EU.
So once again the "think of the children" motive is used to cover for intelligence interests.
by jeroenhd on 7/23/23, 5:43 PM
Looks like there's more going on than what the title implies about the Tor exit node:
> What do you do now?
>§I left Austria and now work for a German company in IT, and have a data center in Kosovo… hosting grey area things there. Warez primarily.
> Also, I do want to add that I have more backstory. The CP was not the only reason for the raid.
He goes on to mention someone using the exit node to try to hack a NATO facility.
That said, the "confiscate first, come up with a fitting crime later" approach countries take on a whim are deeply troubling.
It sounds like they have had their suspicions against this man for a while (not without reason, it seems) and saw the child porn report as a chance to pounce on him, but later found out they didn't have as strong a case as they might have wished.
by linsomniac on 7/23/23, 6:14 PM
My BIL used to work CP with the DHS, a tech going in heavy with the first wave to secure devices.
I asked him if he had ever run into Tor exits, he said no, but they did sometimes run into people with unsecured wireless that had been used by third parties and once it was clear that was what happened it was pretty much dropped. I'm sure they would have ways to deal with people leaving their WiFi open as a way of camouflaging their activities...
He also said that one thing they're usually do if there are multiple people in the house is sit them all down on the couch and say "We are here because someone has been downloading CP", and often everyone would turn and look at one person.
by jaylittle on 7/23/23, 5:21 PM
I stopped running a Tor non-exit node from home a few years back, because a lot of websites and platforms blacklist any IP associated with Tor. I couldn't actually watch anything on Hulu for years (though they were still happy to take my money, which I refused to give them) because of this.
Running a tor node is a thankless thing one can choose to do. Nevertheless I did for years. I don't do it anymore.
by sillysaurusx on 7/23/23, 5:29 PM
The eternal struggle. Information wants to be free, and then people use those freedoms to do the most screwed up things imaginable, and people like this pay the price.
It’s a damn shame how the original cyberpunk dream played out. We could’ve had a world where companies couldn’t do anything about people using their ideas. Instead we get one where you can’t even be anonymous without rubbing elbows with child predators.
It’s surprising how much anonymity and the subject at hand are correlated. In my 20s I liked to explore, as I’m sure many of you do too. I once met someone in the Whonix community who wanted to nix google maps entirely; he spent a lot of time downloading maps and trying to make a way to view them locally, which I think is going to be prescient one day. It already is in many parts of the world — you don’t have cell service, so you can’t just pull up google maps. Nowadays starlink solves that problem, but back then it wasn’t clear that we’d ever be able to have maps at our fingertips regardless of internet access. This was back in the era of that poor CNET reporter that got lost with his family in the mountains precisely because of no maps, and ended up dying to exposure when he went to get help. Never leave your car.
I found all of this fascinating. What a project! Make all of google maps accessible right from your phone, with no internet. I briefly fell in love with that community.
Ultimately what drove me away was the literal flood of child porn that was always right next to anything to do with tor, whonix, or anonymity in general. I have a pretty high tolerance for “operating in gray areas,” like this guy. But one of the tragedies of the cyberpunk dream is that the entire scene has been coopted by cp. In some sense cp is the ultimate test of anonymity, since you’ll be thrown in prison pretty much instantly if caught. So perhaps it’s no surprise that it’s the most common and pervasive result of anonymity, but it sure is a shame.
by teddyh on 7/23/23, 5:11 PM
“The law was changed a few weeks later to include private persons and sole traders as protected lsps, not just companies, but they had to convict me.”
by sedatk on 7/23/23, 9:22 PM
> I was charged and convicted with the support, not the ownership. There is ownership, sale, distribution for no monetary gain, and support of general distribution. The last is what I got and the lowest of all.
Did they also charge the ISP's involved in transferring those network packets?
by rolph on 7/23/23, 5:31 PM
i think this was more than CP.
"What do you do now?
I left Austria and now work for a German company in IT, and have a data center in Kosovo… hosting grey area things there. Warez primarily.
Also, I do want to add that I have more backstory. The CP was not the only reason for the raid.
What do you mean?
Someone used the same exit to hack a NATO facility in Poland, which deals with chemical and biological weapons. Disarming, etc.
The US tried to extradite me from Croatia in 2017, with not much more info than national security.
They lost their case as I am married to a local and cannot be extradited outside the EU."
by zgluck on 7/23/23, 5:14 PM
I noticed they mentioned “logs” of you talking about hosting CP, can you elaborate?
They took a bunch of IRC logs where I stated what I can and can’t host at a web hosting provider I owned. The logs do exist but are taken out of context.
The "reporting" here is at the level of a 90s scene mag.
by Uptrenda on 7/23/23, 11:27 PM
>Someone used the same exit to hack a NATO facility in Poland, which deals with chemical and biological weapons. Disarming, etc.
COVID origin story confirmed! Joking, but that's like something from a movie. I think its really awesome that William was willing to stand for what he believed. TOR is so important for free speech and exit nodes are critical for scaling the system. It just sucks how much his life was disrupted from this.
By the way: there's some very interesting activity happening on Tor at the moment where it seems that overwhelmingly people have decided that they are going to police their own speech to remove CP. In the early days hidden wiki had dedicated pages for that shit. But it's not a thing any more. Furthermore, it seems like hacktivists are actively making sure that the Tor ecosystem stays healthy. Really fascinating because in theory they could just do whatever they liked.
by praptak on 7/23/23, 5:32 PM
Common knowledge from when Tor just started was to limit your exit traffic to countries which cannot extradite you. And definitely block your own country.
by tamimio on 7/23/23, 6:03 PM
>By law they were right as the law only protected registered companies,
So basically to protect yourself running an exit node, register a company, preferably offshore or not within X jurisdiction.
by cf100clunk on 7/23/23, 5:16 PM
The authorities in Styria, south Austria, charged him:
https://web.archive.org/web/20141004142101/http://raided4tor...
by devwastaken on 7/23/23, 8:50 PM
"I rented a server in Poland and someone uploaded CP to an Austrian image hoster. They reported it to the Austrian police, which contacted the ISP, which gave them my WHMCS login IP and then subpoenaed UPC Austria for my address, then queried the weapons registry."
The FBI method of fabricating criminal charges. Criminals sleep comfortably knowing their governments are more interested in playing whack a mole for political image than effectively doing their job. Notice how in Austria they aren't charging Google, or Facebook, or any other entities where such data passes through every day.
by hackan on 7/24/23, 3:04 AM
Yup, had the same experience, also got raided, but unlike him, I got exonerated :) No conviction whatsoever. I had obviously nothing like files nor logs nor whatsoever, and like him the raid was not really related to that, but instead a fight against the government against e-voting. It was certainly quite a ride...
by chad1n on 7/23/23, 5:25 PM
I'd avoid hosting a tor exit node at all costs, considering that they are a lot of bad actors on tor. Even some 3 letter agents can host cp on your tor sites and then accuse you.
by woodpanel on 7/23/23, 6:23 PM
I‘m still amazed how the security agencies pulled it off, to have the ultimate honeypot, a digitized crime scene masquerading as a market place auto-incriminating endless amounts of people. A Kompromat-Miner.
Speaking of miners, it‘s not like they are at the same risk as tor node operators. Not. At. All…
https://gizmodo.com/child-pornography-that-researchers-found...
by kristopolous on 7/23/23, 6:34 PM
This kind of stuff has happened many times before.
I did a video about "the dark web" a couple years ago where I talked about people on zeronet and freenet getting snagged because of potentially the contents of their cache store. It's made for a non technical audience
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3gMJlQU9TDQ
by pstuart on 7/23/23, 5:18 PM
It's almost like they don't want us to run exit nodes...
This man's plight is exactly the reason I won't.
by phyzome on 7/23/23, 7:40 PM
Mods, please add "(2012)" to title...
by croes on 7/23/23, 5:42 PM
Back then in Germany they charged the people who reported CP.
by burtekd on 7/23/23, 5:40 PM
Can someone explain the unrevokable legacy IP addresses?
by 10g1k on 7/24/23, 1:59 AM
Ok, so if one is guilty of transmitting or carrying illegal content merely through providing the medium of transmission, wouldn't that mean the ISPs involved, and the owners of the telephone cables, are just as guilty? Wouldn't any postman, and for example the USPS, be guilty if a private individual posted something illegal?
by anigbrowl on 7/23/23, 6:38 PM
Might be worth adding (in 2012/Austria) to the title. Few people understood what Tor was back then.
by dang on 7/23/23, 9:25 PM
Related ongoing thread:
Why Host in Kosovo? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36837690 - July 2023 (61 comments)
by Sporktacular on 7/23/23, 6:19 PM
So he as guns in his bedroom and 3 more guns in his safe along with a machete (all apparently legal). Not in Mollenbeek or northeastern Paris, but near Graz.
Just your typical guy then.
Running TOR exits are a noble thing to do but people like this damage TOR's reputation.
And while there doesn't seem to be proof he intentionally got involved in CP, a smart pedophile probably would set up an exit node just for plausible deniability.
by KETpXDDzR on 7/24/23, 2:13 AM
One of the concerning problems with the current judicative system is that most judges have no idea about modern technology because of their age. My father asked me today if I'm also working on "AI"... I told him that artificial intelligence doesn't exist and that it's a hype about software that's really good at imitating intelligence.
by peytoncasper on 7/23/23, 5:23 PM
Why don’t we put Tor nodes in space?
Seems like a few hundred micro satellites could circumvent sovereignty this way.
by Cypher on 7/24/23, 1:19 AM
So what about those that own the cables between the nodes that served the files?
by DoItToMe81 on 7/23/23, 7:04 PM
What are the aforementioned "taken out of context" IRC logs? Very curious to see if they were painting the bullseye around the arrow here, or if he actually said he'd host CP.
by VWWHFSfQ on 7/24/23, 12:02 AM
My company blocks all known Tor IP addresses. We simply don't have the capacity (or patience) to deal with the 99% burpsuite spam and abuse that originates from these servers.
by berlincount on 7/23/23, 7:37 PM
Yeah I've had police ring with a search warrant for the same reason.
Yay. Fun.
by Alfagun74 on 7/27/23, 12:08 PM
Moral of the Story: Run your Exit Node in your bathroom and you should be fine
by totetsu on 7/24/23, 2:33 AM
Is this post from 10 years ago being promoted by Reddit bots and made its way here?
by MagicMoonlight on 7/24/23, 4:29 AM
This guy doesn’t sound innocent. It sounds like he just kept his shit offshore.
by thallavajhula on 7/23/23, 5:25 PM
This is similar to the first Episode of the "Mr. Robot" tv show. wow.
by RyanAdamas on 7/23/23, 7:06 PM
I was always standoffish of Freenet for this kind of reason.
by 2OEH8eoCRo0 on 7/24/23, 2:39 AM
> In Austria
by whimsicalism on 7/23/23, 6:09 PM
*not in the US
by treeman79 on 7/24/23, 1:48 AM
Bunch of high level politicians were flying to Epstein’s island raping underage girls. Only person convicted is a woman.
Amazing how there is a protected class of wealthy.
by puffyengineer on 7/23/23, 6:39 PM
Good.
by bendbro on 7/23/23, 8:22 PM
I'm so happy to read the glowies were unable to extradite him to the US.
Hard working nice people
Hard working mean people
Local politicians
------------------------
Property criminals
Violent criminals
Government apparatchiks
MAPS
Federal politicians
by jstummbillig on 7/23/23, 6:28 PM
No, that is not why he was found guilty.
He was found guilty, because running a Tor exit node is not sufficient defense against potential child porn violations. That's good. Because if not every child porn offender could do just that.
by rvnx on 7/23/23, 5:16 PM
Quite logical, same in France and likely many countries; if you run a Tor exit node (or any type of open proxy), you get visited by the police if someone does something wrong on your exit node.
Otherwise what could happen is that you run a Tor node and use it as an excuse for any crime you do.