I became interested in Tor in the spring of 2007 after reading about the situation in Burma and felt that I would like to do something, anything, to help. As a geek and lover of the internet it seemed the best thing I could do was to run Tor as an exit node to allow those under jurisdictions that censor the internet free access to the information they need. I had a lot of unused bandwidth and it seemed like a philanthropic use of it to donate that to Tor.
Tor is a system of anonymizing proxy servers which allows you to visit resources on the web, not just web sites, without revealing your ip address. This is extremely useful for those who are compromised in their access to the internet because it means, rather than attempting to connect directly to the resource in question, say Wikipedia, which might be filtered by their government, they connect to a Tor relay which ultimately routes the request to the resource in question via an exit node. Exit nodes are special kinds of relays which proffer the request on behalf of the original client revealing their ip address, not that of the original requestor, to the destination resource. I sometimes imagine how exciting it must be for soemone in Burma, say, or China, to load up Tor and browse to a web site they have never been able to see before. And to know that there is nothing, nothing, that reveals who it really is who is visiting.
I totally believe in Tor. I think it is a magnificent force for the circumvention of internet censorship but there is a problem.
I was visited by the police in November 2008 because my ip address had turned up in the server logs of a site offering, or perhaps trading in (I was not told the details of the offence) indecent images of children. The date of the offence was about one month after I started the server so it looks as though the site in question had been under surveillance for more than a year.
It was what is known as a ‘dawn raid’ and, amazingly enough, my children were still asleep when it occured. Thank God.
I explained to the officers, who we had heard threatening to break the door down before we let them in, about Tor but they had never heard of it. My wife says she thinks they were about to arrest me before that. I was not arrested. I was told not to touch the computer and it was placed, considerately, in a black plastic bag and taken away for forensic examination.
I was OK at first. I knew that somebody had gone through my server to access that material and that I was not guilty of any offence but as the weeks wore on it started to get to me.
I was overwhelmed by horror to be implicated in such a thing. I was desperately worried about my family. One of the officers had told my wife that Social Services would be informed as a matter of course and there was a possibility that my children would be taken into care.
The low point came about two weeks after the visit by the police when I totalled my car. I was distracted, stressed and unable to accurately assess the road conditions. I ploughed into a hedgerow at speed, destroying the car which we had just bought, but, luckily, walked out of it with only bruised ribs.
I didn’t have the money to hire a lawyer so I just sat the thing out. From time to time the police called with an estimate of when the investigation would be finished but none of that meant very much because those dates came and passed with no resolution.
Eventually, four months after the visit, I picked up a voice message from the police inviting me to call back. When I called I was told that no evidence had been retrieved and the machine would be returned to me.
I think, in retrospect, I was desperately naive to run a Tor exit server on a home computer but I didn’t believe that an ip address in a server log would be enough evidence to warrant seizing equipment.
My wife, God bless her, was absolutely marvellous throughout the whole thing and never doubted me.
I have read with interest about the need to make Tor faster and that that largely depends on having more nodes but there is no way I can contemplate offering my ip address as a service to internet anonymity any more.
It was very frightening for me to be implicated in a serious crime.
As a parent of very young children I have an extensive network of friends and contacts in my neighbourhood who also have children. As we know the subject of paedophilia is not one that can be debated with any rationality at all in the UK. It is surrounded by hysteria. I was terrified that people would find out that my computer had been taken because of that – ‘no smoke without fire’.
I don’t know what can be done about any of this. To my mind running an exit node is extremely high risk. I think Tor is important but I don’t have any ideas about how to support it at the moment.
March 19, 2009 at 11:11 am |
“I don’t know what can be done about any of this. To my mind running an exit node is extremely high risk. I think Tor is important but I don’t have any ideas about how to support it at the moment.”
On your own, there often seems little that you can do to stand up to the Kafkaesque bureaucracy, but there are people who are willing and able to help.
Firstly you (or someone else) should re-post your story to the OR-Talk email list which will alert other Tor server operators, who may have relevant experience and advice.
Similarly, an email to the UK Crypto email list, will also get the attention of most of the legal experts and campaigners in this field.
You (or someone else) could also post your story to http://wikileaks.org – they even offer a Tor Hidden Service method of doing this, but, unfortunately, no encrypted email.
There are civil liberties, human rights and IT security campaigners, journalists and politicians and, to be fair, even a few decent people working within the Database / Surveillance / Nanny / Police state, who might take up your case, if necessary.
If there are still any untrained Policemen in the UK, who are conducting internet crime related investigations, without having first learned about open proxy servers, Tor and other techniques, then they need to be disciplined and retrained and their bosses need to be named and shamed, as they are a risk to innocent members of the public, and the real criminals must be running rings around them.
Feel free to email (PGP Key available) if you need to discuss this in private)
March 21, 2009 at 5:19 pm |
Wow, that is scary. I commend your desire to help, and you should have some level of satisfaction that you may have indeed helped someone, somehow by providing this anonymity service. As a parent, I can’t blame the police for seizing your equipment. Explaining that you have a Tor Exit node might pique the interest of the (tech savvy) police even more, since it would be a perfect cover for someone who is indeed involved in child pornography. The police have to take these things seriously.
I would run a Tor exit node myself, but since I work from home, having my computer seized for 4 months might put a serious kink in meeting deadlines.
Thanks for the post.
AR.
March 22, 2009 at 10:53 pm |
I understand that the police have to investigate these things. But I don’t agree that running an exit node would be perfect cover for an internet paedophile because the ip of the exit node is exposed and publicised. So, a knowledge of Tor might have given the police some indication that an exit node operator is highly unlikely to be involved in internet paedophilia.
April 3, 2009 at 4:23 am
Tor offers criminals plausible deniability. “I run a Tor exit node, Officer. Can you prove that it was me in that chat room?”
March 21, 2009 at 7:24 pm |
Dude,
I was thinking I wanted to do the same altruistic thing and then considered the possibility that what happened to you could happen to me. Anonymity is totally democratic and bad actors take advantage of it.
March 22, 2009 at 11:36 pm |
Anonymity is absolutely democratic of course, which is very refreshing and interesting. And also politically necessary in the same way that PGP is politically necessary. But it does throw up some difficulties. These difficulties have always attended the idea of free speech but they facilitate knowledge and thereby debate which is, surely, what the whole experiment is about. Without debate we stagnate and become apathetic which is a vulnerable position. That vulnerability is most keenly felt in jurisdictions that are, by our standards, repressive. And so it goes on. Without the means to debate the vulnerable become weaker and weaker. Living with the difficulties of an open and uncensored system is a sign of maturity, not complacence.
September 10, 2009 at 6:18 am
Not sure what you are saying here… are you telling me to run the TOR exit point using a neighbor’s unencrypted WIFI hotspot?
March 21, 2009 at 9:38 pm |
Ive tried tor in thailand but no conection
March 22, 2009 at 11:04 pm |
How are you trying to use Tor? I found the easiest way, on a Windows machine, was to get the Vidalia bundle which installs Tor and Privoxy and then use the TorButton plugin for Firefox. It can be slow but I can’t think why it would not work at all.
Vidalia is at
http://vidalia-project.net/
TorButton is at
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2275
and Firefox is at
http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/
March 22, 2009 at 3:51 pm |
Wow. It’s really sad how people take advantage of the philanthropy of others.
March 23, 2009 at 12:33 am |
[...] Why you need balls of steel to operate a Tor exit node I became interested in Tor in the spring of 2007 after reading about the situation in Burma and felt that I would like [...] [...]
April 4, 2009 at 1:30 am |
Are you aware that the UK is about to start deep packet inspection on international Internet traffic?
Your days of freedom in the UK are pretty much over. Enjoy slavery.
http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/25.62.html#subj8
April 4, 2009 at 8:43 am |
Yes I am. I blogged about this. But it could get a lot worse if our insane, puritanical home secretary has her way. There’s an idea to build a data centre that will retain communications data, not just internet, for 6 years! http://tinyurl.com/ckzo9n Of course there is plenty of concern in the UK about where we are heading. It’s absolutely shocking. We are monitored and logged all day long in this country. It is an offence in UK law not to divulge your encryption keys if so requested by the police. The penalty is up to 5 years in prison! http://tinyurl.com/byfncm If a civilised and democratic nation can draft in such legislation I’m sure it will be seen as an absolute endorsement of such draconian measures by more restrictive governments. Which is a disaster for those struggling for freedom in such places. There are many legitimate reasons why one might not want to divulge secrets but none of that matters here. We are ruled by a busybodyocracy that thinks a desire for privacy is evidence of guilt. And they wheel out these bogey-men – internet paedophiles and terrorists for example, to justify it when the reality is it is a failure of security and intelligence, and I suspect, a deeper rooted hair-shirt sensibility that we Brits have never really managed to escape from. We’re going backwards that’s for sure.
April 4, 2009 at 9:05 am |
“Tor offers criminals plausible deniability.”
Yes it does but there are 2 kinds of relay – those that allow exit traffic and those that just relay traffic between nodes. I think you would have to be absolutely mad to run an exit node where there is a chance that your ip would end up in the sever logs of a site participating in illegal traffic and to engage in that illegal traffic yourself. I mean if you’ve got the know-how to run a Tor node in the first place you’ve probably got enough to cover your criminal presence online. To then risk the exposure of your ip address by being an exit node inviting the possibility of criminal investigation would be the height of stupidity. Unless you are a criminal AND a philanthropist. It’s possible.
April 24, 2009 at 6:46 am |
You do realize that if noone ran exit nodes, tor would be unusable.
April 29, 2009 at 8:47 pm
I know and that is what makes me so angry about what happened to me. Basically, in the UK now, running a Tor exit node is too dangerous. You think you can live with the risk but nothing can prepare you for having the police turn up at your door first thing in the morning and seize your machine. You have to explain that to your family. You worry about the neighbours. It is unbelievably stressful and I wasn’t even arrested! They could conceivably have come in here with a tact team and taken the whole house apart. This could easily happen to you if you run Tor as an exit node. I don’t know what the answer is.
September 9, 2009 at 10:58 pm
The answer is a legal defense fund/non-profit that runs exit nodes.
September 10, 2009 at 3:11 am |
I have tried running a Tor node a few times and had to shut it down each time, not because of any legal problems but because it was slowing down my computer. That would not be a problem if Tor were running on a different computer here, as I have plenty of total bandwidth.
My first Tor experiments were with no exit traffic allowed at all, because I could envision just the sort of problems calumog describes. More recently, and with a much better version of the Tor software, I decided to allow email messages to be sent and received from my node, as that sounded fairly harmless.
The exit traffic, if there was any — I didn’t monitor anything — did not cause any problems while the node was running, but then I had to shut it down for other reasons as mentioned above.
It seems to me that people or groups providing politically sensitive material would be better advised to run Tor nodes of their own with hidden services, which Tor provides. In that case there is no exit node at all because the information is hidden inside a Tor node.
It’s more cumbersome to disseminate information that way, as recipients have to be somehow provided with information on how to access the hidden services. That could be done by encrypted email or, better yet, by steganography, which is pretty good at undetectably hiding small amounts of information such as instructions on how to find something within Tor. Of course then one would have to tell people how to find the images or music within which the steganographic bits were hidden.
And then this can all serve some extremely nasty business interests such as child-related criminal traffic mentioned here, as well as helping terrorists plan attacks without risk of detection.
I don’t think there is any way to protect those who might be politically persecuted without also protecting those who might be legitimately prosecuted. We want privacy for the good guys while preventing secret transactions by the bad guys. Both goals cannot be met in their entirety. And of course everyone disagrees on which people are bad and which are good! I suppose the anarchist thinks she is somehow doing good by sabotaging “the system.” And I’m sure oppressive governments believe they are doing good by weeding out activities they believe are dangerous to the state.
Human problems can’t be resolved by technology alone. In the end we are faced with the same kinds of judgments and puzzles we would have had to make at an earlier time in human history.
September 15, 2009 at 3:07 pm
I think you are absolutely right in what you say. Running a Tor exit node is a case of ‘taking the rough with the smooth’. Of course people are going to use it for morally objectionable ends – perhaps even the majority. But we must also understand that the internet as a platform for free speech is under attack. You only have to follow torproject and OpenNet on Twitter to see this. So Tor is more important than ever because if increasingly draconian controls are proposed in liberal jurisdictions we can only imagine what confidence that will give to the already censorious in China, Burma or wherever.
Some people are advocating a sort of Tor filtering – a whitelist but this would itself be censorious and how is it possible to know all the locations where important issues are being discussed and published? Certainly it is not confined to Wikipedia.
I’m afraid the only answer to all of this is to enter into a dialogue with the police so that they understand what Tor is and what its aims are.
May 4, 2009 at 1:20 am |
It is possible to find out the origin.
June 19, 2009 at 10:53 pm |
[...] that I don’t really want to pay $39/month for something that wouldn’t benefit me any, this post is making me reconsider. Of course it’s from the UK which seems to be rapidly turning into [...]
September 9, 2009 at 6:12 pm |
If you want to help anonymous internet, maybe freenet is a better way?
September 9, 2009 at 6:38 pm |
I’m sad about what happened and what is happening, I don’t have much to add just empathy.
September 9, 2009 at 6:44 pm |
Forgive my ignorance, I know next to nothing about Tor, but: is it possible to configure the exit node so that it will only allow access to whitelisted sites, say… wikipedia, facebook, twitter, reddit, etc. etc.
Perhaps that would give you a middle ground which would allow you to operate philanthropically without the danger of getting involved in the more… unsavoury aspects.
September 9, 2009 at 6:53 pm |
I’ve just finished reading 1984, so bear with a little conspiracy theory here. BUT: If you really *do* want to log all internet traffic, then the *first* thing to get rid of is tor exit nodes and similar stuff – how hard can it be? There doesn’t even need to be illegal content out there, the cops just need to log into tor, contact a website (with a recognizable token, e.g. GET parameters) that they control / own. Going through their web servers logs the cops can then collect tor exit node IP addresses. Seize the computer and scare the owner into never providing that service again! In this fashion, each tor exit node could be taken down one by one eventually rendering this form of private networking useless. Proceed with other such services in likewise manner… Big Brother needs to see you to watch you! And seeing you is in your own interest, since the party can never be wrong…
September 15, 2009 at 2:56 pm |
The Tor relays ip addresses are publicly available. https://torstat.xenobite.eu/
September 9, 2009 at 7:00 pm |
[...] a greeting in passing, only so quietly that it may appear that you just ignored the person… Why you need balls of steel to operate a Tor exit node Reddit, I need your help with a problem, a big problem. Zero Punctuation: [...]
September 9, 2009 at 7:16 pm |
I think one possible way of alleviating this kind of issue might be if you could configure Tor exit nodes to allow connecting to only certain websites. This would not be as useful as fully open exit node, but could protect exit node operators and still provide some level of service to Tor users. For example, there are countries that block Wikipedia, but most people outside of those countries would have no problems running a Tor exit node that could only connect to Wikipedia.
September 9, 2009 at 8:03 pm |
[...] Why you need balls of steel to operate a Tor exit node « Passion and dalliance a few seconds ago from web [...]
September 9, 2009 at 8:56 pm |
I have been considering this — the primary worry that I am considering is this exact problem. Would you mind answering some questions, to either set my mind at ease or convince me this is a terrible idea? The biggest thing that worries me is whether or not the police seized every computer in your house, exclusively the TOR node?
September 15, 2009 at 2:53 pm |
They only seized the one computer because that was the only working computer in the house, although I had a panic after when I remembered there was one in the loft that I couldn’t be absolutely sure I’d taken the hard disks out of; I had. Actually the ’search’ was fairly perfunctory. They didn’t take cds, usb sticks or anything else, just the machine.
September 9, 2009 at 9:51 pm |
[...] Why you need balls of steel to operate a Tor exit nodecalumog.wordpress.com [...]
September 9, 2009 at 11:37 pm |
The speed of tor improves with more exit nodes, but the anonymity improves with more middle nodes.
Anyone with spare bandwidth should run a tor middle node to help pass traffic between the people seeking it and the exit nodes with balls of steel.
This reduces the possibility of a tor connection being made entirely through nodes that are controlled by the government (if one entity controls your entire tor session, you have no anonymity), and it carries no risk to you unless it becomes illegal to use tor.
September 10, 2009 at 12:08 am |
We should take a page from the books of those Tor helps get around.
If police would share and maintain a known list of child porn domains/ips, Tor nodes could filter out that traffic. Further, I’d like to see it actively REPORT IPs looking for that stuff. I’m not sure how the Tor technology works, but im sure its possible.
September 10, 2009 at 1:57 am |
What’s ironic is that you were visited by the cops instead of the people in those countries who censor stuff.
September 25, 2009 at 1:54 am |
Wake up. Nothing ironic here. He *is* one of the people in the countries that censor stuff.
September 10, 2009 at 3:36 am |
I think anybody who operates a Tor exit node should take the following precautions: 1) install the exit node on a dedicated host, with no other function on their network; 2) put the host at a static public address; 3) send a letter to their local police explaining that they are operating a Tor exit node, explicitly mentioning the legitimate reasons for doing so, and make sure they provide the cops with a physical description of the installation. If you’re thinking of installing a Tor exit node on a residential network, and you have a family lawyer, then you should absolutely copy the letter to their office.
Basically, you want to make sure the cops have no legal defense when they seize your equipment improperly. Of course, that will be cold comfort when the cops decide to go around seizing Tor exit nodes on general principle.
September 10, 2009 at 4:51 am |
Is it possible that a program like peerguardian could be used on the home computer you are running the TOR exit node on? I suppose the only problem with that there is not a kiddy porn filter list available nor would I want to go on the endeavor of finding one to begin with. But if such a list was available I think that could be a good solution to the problem, Although I guess in a way you are enforcing your own personal censorship and the TOR users might accuse you of being a nazi fascist socialist communist, which in all honesty is pretty harsh.
September 10, 2009 at 5:04 am |
They bust into your home and swipe your PC because someone got some electronic images of people under 18 without clothing. And you think the cops were unhappy to shut down another node? Mission accomplished. Suck it up.
September 10, 2009 at 5:56 am |
making the tor network so everyone is an exit node might fix problems like this. it’s tricky to offer freedom of speech only to have it abused by stuff like this.
bit torrent fixed the problem of one main uploader (a website) to make everyone an uploader.
September 10, 2009 at 8:05 am |
Hi, i take care of some e-commerce sites, and from my own experience i can only say that 95% of all traffic that comes to the websites via a free public proxy, tor node or a sat.phone connection is causing trouble and should be blocked. most times its ‘only’ bots who try to signup or post spam for fake rolex, pills etc, but it also happens quite often that people behind a proxy try to purchase with stolen credit cards.
im sure you would find some more nasty surprises if you had logged all traffic – hoping that only people from china would use your node to read the bbc website is a bit … optimistic
September 15, 2009 at 8:08 pm |
No I am not that naive. If I had monitored the traffic using a utility capable of quickly reconstructing tcp sessions such as CommView or UnSniff I am sure I would have seen a vast amount of pornographic material passing through it; the odd hacker; a spammer bcc’ing a bunch of email addresses. However, for some reason, I never expected to get into trouble with the police. I thought I might get into trouble with my isp and, in fact, I did receive a cease and desist regarding material being shared via BitTorrent that I was not responsible for. I guess the police still see the presence of an ip address in a web server log as irrefutable evidence that the owner of the ip address has been there. Then of course one is not prepared for the effect that being implicated in a serious crime has.
But there is something else going on here that is specific to the UK. The last I checked there were 238 exit nodes in the US and 33 in the UK. But, to my knowledge, what happened to me has never happened in the US.
September 10, 2009 at 11:30 am |
You can filter the tor service so it will only allow traffic to wiki media/wikipedia/etc…
It is limiting, but still very usefull for other people out there.
September 10, 2009 at 12:46 pm |
Good thing you don’t live in the USA. Not sure if this has been said or not in the prior comments, but you likely would have been thrown in prison during the initial dawn raid, forced to register as a sex offender for life, and your kids taken from your wife. All with absolutely no opportunity for a fair trial.
September 10, 2009 at 1:01 pm |
[...] Why you need balls of steel to operate a Tor exit node [...]
September 10, 2009 at 2:30 pm |
Hi,
i have also problems with police because i was running Tor exit node. There was some bank hacking via my computer. Fortunetly it wasn’t so bad, i was asked to provide all information like logs, who has access to it, and so on. No computer was taken, even hard disks. This was in Poland.
No i will only provide relay node, or enforce stricter exit policy (like give access only to specific subnets outside of my country
September 10, 2009 at 3:13 pm |
I used to run Tor as an exit node on my router (I’m not at the moment because we just moved, but I do plan on doing it again.) It was running for at least a year with near 24/7 uptime on a relatively fast connection (Verizon FiOS) and I’ve never had a problem even remotely like this. I half expected to get a call or a letter from Verizon, but not even that. I’m sorry to hear about what happened, but I seriously hope this doesn’t prevent other people from operating exit nodes.
September 10, 2009 at 3:43 pm |
An alternative that would pose lower risk to those with families would be for altruistic individuals, such as yourself, to band together to pay for a co-located a server at a data center (after checking with the data center that hosting a tor exit node is permitted at their location). When the police trace the IP address and want to go get the computer, they will (hopefully) bang on the data center’s door and not yours.
This also has a technical advantage: the data center will have a much faster connection to the internet than you do at home.
A further way to insulate your home from this nonsense would be for the interested individuals to set up a non-profit to operate and pay for the co-located server(s) and then that non-profit would have its own business address, so that even when the data center tells the police the owner of the server(s), there’s (hopefully) no one breaking your door down at 6am and scaring your children to death.
September 10, 2009 at 4:03 pm |
in the us, you are held responsible for EVERYTHING that is done on your internet connection… so if you have a SSID broadcast and don’t pw protect it, if anything is found via log files, its your ass! Not the person who’s using tor exit node, but you.
September 15, 2009 at 8:11 pm |
[...] Why you need balls of steel to operate a Tor exit node « Passion and dalliance a few seconds ago from web [...]
September 16, 2009 at 2:16 am |
I think the Exit Node should support the white-list function, so, you can indicate which sites you can support for the Tor users, this way, you can help people in China or Burma.
September 16, 2009 at 4:07 am |
[...] Why you need balls of steel to operate a Tor exit node « Passion and dalliance (tags: tor internet privacy police lang:en anonymous raid blog) [...]
October 28, 2009 at 6:25 am |
[...] proxies, there are still many hurdles to overcome including Exit Node harassment and raids, like this one , which scare users out of running an open [...]
October 29, 2009 at 3:32 pm |
[...] Or, relatedly, who chooses what information you do get? Has anyone run into the Sourcewatch wiki, which monotor’s the PR industry’s hold on communication? Is that a public benefit of the internet? How about wikileaks? Would it be a good thing if we were involved in internet privacy schemes? Or would that give license to child pornographers? [...]