TOR Admin Arrested

It is a very bad time to have anything to do with anonymity in Germany.

CNet reports that a TOR administrator was arrested, but that the German police were so incompetent that they did not take down the TOR server, or accesses it, rather arrest the administrator of the system when he was at home 500 kilometers away from the system.

In the owners blog, he pretty much so rails on about the issue, and has decided that he can no longer afford to run a TOR server given the current environment of anonymity within Germany at this time.

While TOR is a great system, like any other system it can be used for both good and bad. Most smart hackers will route their attacks through the TOR network if they do not have access to a botnet. Lots of good information passes through TOR, while a lot of bad information also passes through the system on a daily basis.

Since the German police are on the lookout for people who use the system for bad things, like bomb threats, then they need to see if they can get access to the server to find out and attempt to backtrack the connection as best they can. It is not the proxies issue; rather it is the data that is going across the proxy. However, the fall out from this one goes well beyond the arrest and the associated problems of running the TOR server, rather it is the loss of a node in the system due to police interference.

The consequences: I’ve shut down my Tor-server. I can’t do this any more, my wife and I were scared to death. I’m at the end of my civil courage. I’ll keep engaged in the Tor-project but I won’t run a server any more. Sorry. No. Source: TOR Madness Reloaded

That is where the problem really resides, the TOR network has to be open, and people will do some really stupid things when they think they are anonymous. The problem is that there are real ramifications to sending bomb threats to the police.

What is stunning in this regard though is that the German police did not work with the TOR administrator. If they had worked with the admin, and the admin had worked with them, then this might have flown under the wire. There would not be the huge embarrassment for the German police at this time.

The benefit of police working with system administration, when there is a major issue should be standard fare, when trying to figure out who did a crime. This kind of collaboration happens all the time, and has positive beneficial results. Draconian measures never solve problems, and the German Police find themselves discredited on this one.