Germany Stinks of Onions Today

Breaking news today concerning online privacy in the EU. The situation was already bleak, what with the raft of bad laws lobbied for (the cynical might say bought) by media giants and others. This is worse. German police have raided a string of servers running as TOR nodes. TOR is an anonymous internet communication system developed by the venerable Electronic Frontier Foundation to allow very secure, private communication using multiple encryped links between random points on a network of servers. This is to allow those with limited means and expertise a free, reliable, safe connection. Cyberdissidents in China, those who wish to break information to the media without the NSA knowing, people like that. By design, anyone can use it for any purpose, and all are free to contribute resources to the network. It's A Good Thing.

But it has opponents, the Chinese Government for instance is probably not keen on cyberdissidents being so well tooled. Any government, for that matter, may have issues with secure anonymous communication because it allows absolute freedom of speech. Not legally defined, can-say-things-within-certain-limits type freedom of speech, real freedom of speech, being able to say anything you want without consequence, and to watch without being observed.

There are some poor arguments against TOR. Politicians say ˝What if criminals use the net, we can't evesdrop?˝ (since 9/11 replace with 'terrorists'). People say ˝What if what is said is a lie˝, or worse ˝What if we dislike what is said, how will we stop them saying it?˝. In reality terror networks and organised crime can already communicate under the radar of law enforcement, they have sophisticated methods, TOR won't change that. TOR is for ordinary people, and that's what gives authority the willies, ordinary people not being controlled. No censorship, no imposed moderation, no way to tie an avatar to a person in the real world.

The reason given by German authorities is the absolute worst. They say TOR helps child porn distribution. Probably it does, and that's entriely beside the damn point. For one thing, TOR nodes don't keep logs, so there's no information to be siezed that could possibly help an investigation. TOR is a worldwide network, so siezing German servers won't affect the network as a whole, but will intimidate German admins trying to advance online privacy. Sure, kiddie porn may have something to do with TOR, but TOR has nothing to do with kiddie porn.

Let me explain. Suppose you make photocopiers. Someone could conceivably buy one and use it to make copies of illegal images in the process of distributing child porn. They are then resposible for a crime and it's up to the police to do something about it. You don't go having a crackdown on photocopier manufacturers and technicians. Its not their fault. The kiddie porn was reproduced with a copier, but the copier technology is neutral to it. Likewise email and fax machines are used to distribute illegal images. That doesn't mean we should ban email, or that the role of the police has changed. The role of the police is still to bring criminals to justice, doing forensics on said illegal images, detective work, sting operations, undercover agents, all that cop stuff. Once upon a time, before modems, kiddie porn was distributed by postal mail and cops would intercept it. That's not the world anymore. Not being able to waylay the postman loses the cops a trick, but that doesn't substantially alter the work of the police.

In short, there's nothing to be gained by the police in shutting down these nodes, and they know it. The phrase kiddie porn is bandied around because it's a convenient moral panic. Something the general public is so passionately upset about that it's mere mention drives all rational thoughts from their brains and they take to the streets baying and howling, pitchforks in hand. Anyone with a shred of sane reservation about all this attracts facile accusations of not caring about the children or being 'one of them'.

And that's how I think it's going to go. Supermarket newspapers will run headlines about ˝internet perverts˝ running systems ˝to spread kiddie porn˝, and rouse people up. And politicians will rouse them up further and say ˝This TOR thing is about kiddie porn and it should be illegal˝. And John Q Public won't understand, because he doesn't care for learning about things like cryptographic networks, he's just some guy in a bar watching some suit on TV talk about ˝family values˝. And there goes a shining hope for empowering citizens towards democracy, flushed down a toilet of ignorance and politics. And it pisses me off.

Dammit.

And shutting down TOR won't do a damn thing to stop kiddie porn.

Dammit.

Link to English News Article
Via BoingBoing

UPDATE: Good news, apparently the German police are not pressing charges against the TOR operators, they were following some kind of procedure to do with a larger kiddie porn sting, but not directed against privacy services directly. Detail

Created 2006-09-11 01:28:33 by 789 and filed under internet

Comments

CertainDoom writes...

Off topic somewhat, but where I work, we`ve had some trouble with TOR being used to mask DDOS attacks. It seems that TOR is very enabling for people that want to get away with crimes, whether its kiddie porn or attacking with bandwidth floods. The EFF has been wrong on this one for years -- stubbornly so. Facilitating network abuse is not helping anyone`s free speech, it is just letting criminals have a free easy way to exploit. TOR needs to be discouraged, because of the abuse it facilitates.

posted: 2006-09-11 02:52:26