[OPSEC/Computer] Tor Exit Node Operator Issued Subpoena

Hello fellow brothers, and sisters. In keeping with keeping everyone up to date on Tor, and Dark Net activities and happenings, I thought some of you might find interest in this.

https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-relays/2015-April/006804.html


Comments


[28 Points] winlifeat:

Looked up the IP that the paper said the tor node accessed http://www.clearwebstats.com/hosted-ip/12.218.239.38/#.VTVi1NypViF

Only one site, cookcountyboardofreview.com, as mentioned in the complaint.

I Googled cook county board of review hacked and found this http://chicagotonight.wttw.com/2014/04/09/cook-county-computers-hacked

in case anyone is interested


[13 Points] ErraticWire:

I loved their example here.


[10 Points] CocaineNose:

"I mailed them what Tor is and why I can't help them in identifying this person".. lol


[8 Points] fuckoffplsthankyou:

Makes me want to know what's so interesting about 12.218.239.38.

Appears to be an IIS 7 box.


[9 Points] Spoogly:

From HackerNews,

I've received a subpoena from Cook County before regarding a site on Neocities. Related to Tor, actually. Easily the stupidest thing I've ever seen in my life. The person that signed the subpoena was in the news for allegations of corruption, and so was her husband (it's called Crook County for a reason). They spelled the name of my company wrong (noahcities.com or something like that), and when I sent a letter to the designated agents requesting they fix it (I control neocities.org, not noahcities, how can I respond to legal requests addressed to a different web site?), they never responded, and the subpoena basically just died. If they had followed up, they would have gotten a tor exit IP address somewhere outside of their jurisdiction (read: another country). I told them this before they filed it, and they told me "That decision is for someone above my pay grade, man". You can't spend 5 minutes to google for Tor because of your "pay grade"? Oh, and they also love to put unlawful (but unfortunately, not illegal) gag orders in their subpoenas. I chose not to waste our lawyer's time (and our money) on this piece of trash, so we didn't make too big of a deal about it. The take home lesson for me was that crooked regional governments abusing the subpoena system are just as big of a problem as the NSA, if not worse. So, now you know the story behind this commit http://github.com/neocities/neocities/commit/4983a9b24eac00b... It's not good enough for the NSA, but it will prevent these idiots from ever figuring it out. And there's no US data retention laws for web sites, so it's completely legal. This is textbook Neocities business philosophy. Instead of raising money to hire more lawyers and take the legal risk individually fighting bad John Doe subpoenas, we changed our code to make the data they can actually get worthless to them, so we can just serve them (if they're valid) while still protecting our users' privacy. If we get dragged into court over it, our liability insurance kicks in, we pay a (relatively) small deductible, and then we can use the precedent we set there to throw out any new cases for everybody with this problem, not just us. Way more sustainable. Phase 2 is that I delete the hashes after a few months. I haven't gotten to it yet, but it's in the ticket tracker.

--Looking at that, it looks like this is an issue of not caring that it's going to turn up no good information, and just filing the paperwork blindly based upon what would be done if it was not a Tor relay. They likely know full well that there's no good in it, but it's part of their process to do it anyway, "just in case". Or something of that sort.


[3 Points] None:

[deleted]


[3 Points] None:

heh, also kind of funny he says the subpoena came from washington when it actually came from washington street in chicago...


[3 Points] sharpshooter789:

Realevent article:

http://www.computerworld.com/article/2912234/cook-county-subpoenas-romanian-security-firm-a-tor-exit-node-operator-for-real-ip.html


[2 Points] We_Are_Never_Safe:

-comment overwritten-


[1 Points] MLP_is_my_OPSEC:

What a surprise. I seriously hope they don't comply.