What happened when the FBI subpoenaed Boing Boing over our Tor exit node

boing
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I had garlic soup last night. My exit node is definitely malicious.

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I got a similar behavior in Italy, but the story is so strange.

They directly accused me to do unlegal stuff and ask me to reach the police station.

When I go to they show me details of the unlegal stuff that my IP does butā€¦ they talk about a specified date andā€¦ I donā€™t have any DSL contract at that time o.O. I show to the policeman my DSL contract that start after the incriminated date and he left me without problem.

I think that all of my story is fake and is only a method used from italian police to scare exit-node operators.

If you want we can talk with more details about the story and I ask a legal if I can publish original documents.

BOINGBOING!

Cheers

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I was just thinking, in a case where you did have to keep logs for some reason, it might be fun to save them in some really inconvenient format. Like where all numbers are written out long formā€¦ So your web server logs might look like:

At seven twenty-three and fifteen seconds p.m., a computer at IP address one-hundred twenty-seven dot oh dot oh dot one made a GET request for /index.html - I returned a 200 status for a response of sixteen-thousand nine-hundred and fourteen bytes. The browser identified itself as Microsoft Internet Explorer [...etc...]

Have fun converting and poring over those, agents!

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Do you pay your IRS bill in bags of pennies, by any chance? :wink:

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I mean, how hard could a patch be? Starting an attempt now

(Based on the anecdotal evidence here, I donā€™t think that the FBI would care enough about the logs unless there was actually a large criminal case)

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That page is provided by tor itself! See: https://gitweb.torproject.org/tor.git/tree/contrib/operator-tools/tor-exit-notice.html

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They tracked the IP address back to us.

We have the reverse for that IP set to tor-exit.boingboing.net, which actually resolves to a page outlining the issues: http;//tor-exit.boingboing.net/

Additionally, Iā€™m listed as a contact on that page, though interestingly, they didnā€™t bother to contact me, just used our registrant information in WHOIS.

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Bleugh. Timestamps are incompatible, but Iā€™ve remembered how to hate the english language. There also may or may not be a memory leak somewhere. This is what I get for only coding in HLLsā€¦

six ten, forty-three seconds and seven hundred nine thousand five hundred twenty-three microseconds, post meridiem [notice] Tor v0.2.7.2-alpha-dev (git-887d86b76d0c1088) running on Linux with Libevent 2.0.22-stable, OpenSSL 1.0.2d and Zlib 1.2.8.
six ten, forty-three seconds and seven hundred nine thousand six hundred fourteen microseconds, post meridiem [notice] Tor can't help you if you use it wrong! Learn how to be safe at https://www.torproject.org/download/download#warning
six ten, forty-three seconds and seven hundred nine thousand six hundred thirty-two microseconds, post meridiem [notice] This version is not a stable Tor release. Expect more bugs than usual.
six ten, forty-three seconds and seven hundred nine thousand six hundred sixty-four microseconds, post meridiem [notice] Configuration file "/usr/local/etc/tor/torrc" not present, using reasonable defaults.
six ten, forty-three seconds and seven hundred twelve thousand one hundred sixty-one microseconds, post meridiem [notice] Opening Socks listener on 127.0.0.1:9050
six ten, forty-three seconds and seven hundred twelve thousand two hundred eight microseconds, post meridiem [warn] Could not bind to 127.0.0.1:9050: Address already in use. Is Tor already running?
six ten, forty-three seconds and seven hundred twelve thousand two hundred sixty-two microseconds, post meridiem [warn] Failed to parse/validate config: Failed to bind one of the listener ports.
six ten, forty-three seconds and seven hundred twelve thousand two hundred ninety-eight microseconds, post meridiem [err] Reading config failed--see warnings above.
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Donā€™t believe the headlines friend! Freedom fights, political parties in repressive regimes need this! Not just some sickos loners!

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I know. I was joking. I very much agree.

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Although itā€™s true that they raided my house, confiscated my equippment and arrested me they did not bring up any charges. I was released the next morning and the police even drove me home; the investigator from the ā€œStaatsschutzā€ (something like the DHS) released all confiscated material the next day. No judge was involved, just a stateā€™s attorney - field of work child care. Infact, the police asked a judge for a seqarch warant, which was denied. So the police waited for the judge to knock off from work, just to scare the hell out of the stateā€™s attorney, yelling about bomb scares and terrorism.

The lesson learned here was that the police simpy didnā€™t know a damn thing about Tor and lacked basic internet research skills. In fact, they sent out mails (on paper) to the datacenter where my server was housed and almost a week later decided that thereā€™s time for action.

It was not a pleasant experience, granted - it was a major clusterfuck.

Alex.

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