Some legal trouble with TOR in France

[Olivier Barbut]

Hello dear tor talkers,

I'm running the tor router "mini", located in paris, france, and I
believe I have to share with you what happened to me last wednesday,the
10th of May. My router was an outside gateway, doing request for tor
anonymous users.

Last wednesday morning, at 7:45, three cops did knock at my door. They
suspected me to have downloaded some child porn videos. As I was waking
up, I understood it was tor-related. I did explain them I was a TOR
outside gateway, but they didn't knew about it. They searched everywhere
in my small home and took every support they could find: hard drives
they removed from computers, cds, disks, and then they took me to the
police station, at the child protection service, jailing me the whole
day while they was searching my hard drives and cds for traces of the
video they was looking for.

They did asked me if they was a way to trace back to the criminal who
downloaded this child abuse video, but I told them "not in my knowledge"
and "the tor network is designed to make this impossible, keeping no log
of traffic".

At 19:00, having not found these video, having learned more about tor
and confirmated I was running it, they freed me, giving me back my cds
and hard drives.

It's sad the way some people use their freedom, e.g. participating in
child abuse, but I'm still a strong believer in the necessity of
anonymity on the internet.

As I asked them, they did assure me they accessed my hard drives
read-only, using hardware write disabler, but I still prefer not to run
it straight from the hard drive they had in hand for the whole day as I
know cops are not that trustable. The "mini" router will be back in a
few days. Not getting paranoid, but using paranooa to make sane decisions !

Do you know if similar things did happenned to other routers ?

If you wants some more details, or have advice for me please ask and /or
give.

Thanks everyone for making this possible !


Olivier Barbut

----- End forwarded message -----
--
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
______________________________________________________________
ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820            http://www.ativel.com
8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A  7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE

[demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature which had a name of signature.asc]