German TOR site raided
p2pnet news | P2P:- German police raided the Düsseldorf apartment of the operator of a Tor exit node sometime after midnight on a Sunday morning in July, says Heise Online.
Why all the attention?
He’s said to have threatened to bomb the offices of the German Federal Employment Services Agency, “and/or kill an employee”.
The operator’s equipment was seized, “on account of a posting he was alleged to have made to a private police forum by the name of CopZone,” says the story.
But the server for the anonymizing The Onion Router network at a hosting provider’s premises wasn’t touched, says Heise, going on:
In the incriminating posting to the forum, which can no longer be found on the Internet, the person whose flat was raided was alleged by the police to have threatened to plant a bomb in the offices and/or kill an employee of the German Federal Employment Services Agency.
As the IP address relating to the forum posting had been anonymized with the help of the network and thus pointed to the Tor exit node, the investigators assumed that it was the server operator who had posted the entry. It took several hours for the police to realize their mistake.
What remains unclear however is why the computers of the man from Düsseldorf were confiscated but the server itself was not.
Heise says the tour operator posted “I’m at the end of my civil courage” in English in his blog entry, decided to shut down wormhole.ynfonatic.de.
He added in Engliosh:
Raiding the premises of the operator of a Tor exit node in an attempt to determine the author(s) of a specific forum posting is a fairly futile exercise. Investigating authorities should instead make use of fundamental weaknesses of anonymization networks. Thus according to a scientific study a party can by seeding the network with manipulated Tor servers monitor the anonymizing network to a certain degree.
A short time ago the Swede Dan Egerstad was able with a manipulated Tor exit node to successfully phish hundreds of passwords belonging to authorities and embassies.
Also See:
Heise Online – Tor server operator shuts down anonymizing server after police raid, September 17, 2007
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September 21st, 2007 at 1:21 pm
There are already some exit nodes that only relay traffic to remote foreign IPs. This precaution could work until the authorities get tired of cross-continent manhunt and legislators introduce a blanket ban on cryptography.