German Police Seize 'Anonymizing' Tor Servers

SEP 11, 2006 12:26:25 PM | View/Add Comments (1) | Permalink

In a crackdown on Internet child pornography, German police detected several servers running a copy of Tor, a software designed to anonymize Internet usage.

"We seized or blocked an undisclosed number of servers during a raid, which is still under way," Jens Gruhl, a spokesman for the public prosecutor’s office of Konstanz, Germany, said Monday. "A few of these computers had installed copies of Tor."

Users of Tor software in the country, worried about an unexpected visit by the police, have decried the move in a flurry of blogs.

"This situation is disturbing, really disturbing," wrote Alexander Janssen from Dusseldorf, Germany, in a blog. "I run a Tor server myself and the last thing I want to experience is the police kicking down my door [and] seizing my computer."

Gruhl said German crime officials are not specifically searching for servers running Tor, but for servers distributing child porn. "That fact that police discovered copies of Tor is coincidental, not intentional."

In his blog, Janssen said he believed the seized servers were configured to be so-called Tor "exit nodes," allowing their IP addresses to show up in the server logfiles in question.

Tor was created to defend against traffic analysis, a form of network surveillance that "threatens personal anonymity and privacy, confidential business activities and relationships and state security," according to the website http://tor.eff.org/.

The software bounces communications around a distributed network of servers, called onion routers, protecting users from websites that build profiles of their interests, local eavesdroppers who read data or learn what sites they visit, and even the onion routers themselves.

-John Blau, IDG News Service (Dusseldorf Bureau)

link:
http://www.cio.com/blog_view.html?CID=24689

Sabu

from the tor homepage:

Sep 11 2006:

Last week, a few Tor exit nodes were seized by the German police in a massive sting against child pornography. From our friends on the ground in Germany, we hear that dozens and dozens of other computers unrelated to Tor may have been seized too.

So far as we know, only six of those were Tor servers. We have heard from the server operators. None of them has been charged. We hope that this is just a misunderstanding that can be solved by educating German law enforcement about Tor.

This is not a "crackdown on Tor", as has been widely reported. This seems to be part of a wide sweep on computers associated by IP address with a large child porn bust. There does not seem to be any specific targeting of Tor — Tor is used by journalists, human rights activists, dissident bloggers, and a vast array of blameless users.

We hope that the volunteer Tor server operators in Germany will get their equipment back after this has blown over, and there will be no action against Tor.

Please contact Shava Nerad for more press information.

If you are a Tor server operator in Germany, please contact Julius Mittenzwei for more information.

link:
http://tor.eff.org/index.html.en#News

read this blog too!

Germany: Crackdown on TOR Node- Operators:
http://itnomad.wordpress.com/2006/09/10/ge...node-operators/

Sabu