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Man Found Guilty of Child Porn, Because He Ran a Tor Exit Node
(lowendbox.com)
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this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2023
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It’s encrypted, encrypted many times over, it’s completely anonymous… as long as you’re staying inside the network. An exit node connects to the regular internet and that’s what’s going to start showing up on logs. This was completely secure for the people actually dealing in cp.
I can’t believe this stuck, it’s the equivalent of arresting a business owner because someone distributed cp while connected to their Wi-Fi.
CP laws (in the US and probably other places) fall under a doctrine called strict liability, which basically means that you're guilty regardless of intent or even knowledge of an offense.
It's fucked.
Yet isps aren't affected
There isn't a crime worse than hurting children. Does that mean we should allow law enforcement infinity leeway to punish these crimes and persue the offenders? I hate to ever give law enforcement any leeway as abuse is so common, but if someone is hurting children I don't care how you stop it.
Is hosting a tor exit nods with the knowledge that doing so might help pedophiles hurting children? That feels like too many layers to me. Too esoteric.
Is this satire? Because that's exactly the excuse government has been giving for hundreds of years, to take your freedoms away.
It's never about the children. The Catholic church operating with near total immunity, after all these millennia of abuse, is proof of that.
You're right and I agree completely. My ACAB hat slips when they bring up kinds. Which is, of course, their intent.
Every person and business that has any wifi or server on the internet "might help pedophiles hurting children". Amazon S3? Could hypothetically be used in CP (actually almost definitely is used for CP by somebody).
Your email address? Could be used by somebody malicious for CP. Which means if you think it's that important to stop pedophiles hurting children, you should shut it down.
And in fact, Lemmy is decentralized and can absolutely be used (let's be honest, somebody probably already is somewhere) to distribute CP. We should be openly opposing Lemmy now, right?
...boiling down to the real problem. There are so many uses for Tor that have nothing to do with CP and so few Tor users that deal in CP. Privacy is a valuable thing and we should not be murdering privacy for all people in hope it might stop 1 or 2% of child predators.
It's quite possible he had either a public defender or a poor attorney. I am friends with an attorney who works with the poor, indigent, and people otherwise unable to fight for themselves. I help him out for free when he has questions related to technology and IT. I really need to read up on Tor because there might come a time when I'll need to assist my friend in a similar matter. It's quite chilling that the state could potentially punish a business owner for providing a free service like WiFi. I have another friend who runs a the neighborhood sports bar and she offers WiFi to her customers. I think I need to implement some content filtration for her so as to prevent her from potentially getting blamed for a crime she did not commit.
Which has probably happened. It's (shady uses, not necessarily this use) one of the reasons there was a big push to get consumers to put a password on their wifi back in the day.
Surprise! It has: https://www.registercitizen.com/news/article/Man-mistakenly-charged-with-child-porn-after-12077668.php
Yep. Routers used to come wide open out of the box, you had to actively secure them. They come with reasonable initial security now probably because of things like that.
In this context (running a tor exit node) none of that would matter. You can't choose to run an exit node and then try to feign innocence or ignorance. It's why I have deep respect for anyone willing to run an exit node because you're taking on MASSIVE risk for absolutely no reward.
"used to". Xfinity includes a public access point on my router that I'm not able to turn off. They used to lie about it and deny it until too many people caught on.
Not completely secure. If the same entity controls the entry and exit nodes (any maybe also relay?), it is my understanding that traffic can be traced back. Low probability, yes, but not completey.
And guess who's got a lot of funding to run honey pot nodes?