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Man Found Guilty of Child Porn, Because He Ran a Tor Exit Node (The Story of William Weber) - LowEndBox

lowendbox.com Man Found Guilty of Child Porn, Because He Ran a Tor Exit Node (The Story of William Weber) - LowEndBox

Guns. Drugs. TOR. Child pornography. The long and twisted tale of LowEndTalk's famous member William goes deep.

William Weber, a LowEndTalk member, was raided by Austrian police in 2012 for operating a Tor exit node that was allegedly used to distribute child pornography. While he was not arrested, many of his computers and devices were confiscated. He was later found guilty of supporting the distribution of child pornography through his Tor exit node, though he claims it was unintentional and he was simply supporting free speech and anonymity. He was given a 5 year probation sentence but left Austria shortly after. Though some articles portray him negatively, it is debatable whether he intentionally supported child pornography distribution or simply operated in the legal grey area of Tor exit nodes.

Slacker News @lemmy.world

Man Found Guilty of Child Porn, Because He Ran a Tor Exit Node

lowendbox.com /blog/man-found-guilty-of-child-porn-because-he-ran-a-tor-exit-node-the-story-of-william-weber/

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Technology @lemmy.world

Man Found Guilty of Child Porn, Because He Ran a Tor Exit Node

lowendbox.com /blog/man-found-guilty-of-child-porn-because-he-ran-a-tor-exit-node-the-story-of-william-weber/

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TechNews @radiation.party

Man Found Guilty of Child Porn, Because He Ran a Tor Exit Node

lowendbox.com /blog/man-found-guilty-of-child-porn-because-he-ran-a-tor-exit-node-the-story-of-william-weber/

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118 comments

We oughtta arrest the people who pave roads because human traffickers use them to commit crimes.
- I wonder if the ISP got charged as well lol
  
  The charges usually end up falling onto the last one who can't stick them onto someone else.
  Like, a carrier can blame the ISP, who can blame the VPN, who can check its logs and blame an address owner, who... better keep their own logs capable of identifying someone else if they're letting random people do random stuff using that address. And a good lawyer, and will and money to fight it.
  
  From the article...
  Yes, as they had to give me the minimum sentence. By law they were right as the law only protected registered companies, unlike in Germany for example. The law was changed a few weeks later to include private persons and sole traders as protected lsps, not just companies, but they had to convict me. No choice in the end.
  So, ISPs in Austria actually have legal protection from liability here, rightfully so, and also rightfully so, that protection was extended to private persons as well. A rare story of a legal system apparently working well, with regard to the marriage of privacy and technology.

Shouldn't all social media, ISPs, Apple, Google, etc also be found guilty of the same crime then? What about CDN?
- you see, they are companys and they make monzees that they dont pay taxes on, so its fine. But that guy was a terroristic web activist, subverting the order of the free world by providing free tools to a community of which some used it for illegal purposes.
- The article explains that this was basically a flaw in the way the law was written

The absolute balls on the man to continue after being raided. It's unfortunate that the private internet requires people like him to risk their safety so it can continue to operate.

Reading the article, it's not just distributed CP. Someone also used his Tor Exit to hack into a NATO facility in Poland that dealt in chemical/biological weapons. Like, yeeesh.
- This “someone” sounds an awful lot like a nation-state actor.
- Yikes 😬

I am from austria and honestly I feel ashamed. What honestly gets my blood boiling is the fact, that there is a high chance the people that connected through his exit node are probably still free.
It is like jailing the postman for delivering a letter containing CP. Anyway I hope the people actually actively distributing and using CP get what they deserve.
- Here the crime is privacy, which is the same thing many countries are trying to curtail, including France, which is clamping down hard on encryption.
  With time we will see services like protonmail or vpns vilified in order to make them inaccessible to the public.
- You shouldn't feel too ashamed, in the end Weber got 5 years of probation on the sentence of "support of general distribution", and shortly after the law was amended to give private persons like Weber the same protection from liability that ISPs enjoy from how people use their network. At least, according to Weber.

I'm surprised this doesn't happen more often. Home routers are trivial to compromise, and compromised home routers can also be used to distribute illegal content.

I always read this is why you run a relay as an individual not an exit. Some one has to run a exit at some point though.
- You don't need an exit node to browse Tor hidden sites. Acting as a relay middle node is also not a problem.
  Exit nodes are kind of a "plausible deniability" thing for Tor users from places where using Tor might be frowned upon, but otherwise you can find anything you may want to use Tor for, on hidden sites themselves.
  For as much as I'd like to help the Tor network and the idea of free speech, articles like this are why I'd rather let the CIA and other national sponsors take the brunt of running those exit nodes.
  
  But someone somewhere has to be an exit node. Not you, necessarily, in order to browse, but somebody has to be running them. Right?

This is equivalent to a criminal running into a crowd to get away from police, and the police just stopping, arresting, and charging the first person in the crowd that they see for not doing anything to stop them.

Btw, what’s the current judicial status of exit nodes around the world? Why was he charged, yet the isp wasn’t? Would the isp be charged if it ran a similar exit node, or is it strictly because it was a private entity?
- Rule of thumb: You get the blame.
  TL;DR: Ask a lawyer.
  You can compare them to VPNs for the severity of restrictions (in 2020):
  
  For some more historical info, there is this list on Wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tor_(network)#Reception,_impact,_and_legislation
  For a more US-centric FAQ, you can check: https://community.torproject.org/relay/community-resources/eff-tor-legal-faq/
  Still, most countries don't like random people to let other unidentified random people to do random stuff, most police officers are ill equipped or educated to deal with it, legislation hasn't been tested in most places, and you're running a hard to define, changing, and sometimes random level of risk.

Child pornography is in no way acceptable and cannot be rationalized as normal. He got what he had coming to him as far as I am concerned.
- He wasn't searching for it or knowingly distributing it. The way Tor exit nodes work is that you're hosting a machine that lets other people on the Tor network communicate with the internet. You're essentially routing a portion of the entire network's traffic through your machine. You can't really control who is using it or what it transmits at that point.
  He got punished because somebody else shared CP, using his equipment to do so. It's like being jailed for having your car stolen and being used to hit a pedestrian.
  
  Ah, okay. I probably should have read closer. I will delete my comment.
  
  It's like being jailed for having your car stolen and being used to hit a pedestrian.
  Exactly this, except that nobody stole your car. You are providing free and no-questions-asked open access to your car for any member of the public who needs to use it. Many other people also used the car that day for legitimate business or for fun, but then one guy got in it and ran over 32 people in a furious rampage.
  Clearly the driver is at fault here, but a case can be made (and apparently, was) that this would not have been possible had you not provided access to the car to the perp in question.
  
  It's like being jailed for having your car stolen and being used to hit a pedestrian.
  Kind of... only you parked the car in front of a jail, left the door open, keys in the ignition, and a "FREE TO USE" sign next to it.
  Hey, maybe the next guy will just use it to go buy some groceries... maybe.
  
  This is the first I've heard of it. Why would someone willingly host an exit node when the risks are so high?
- The feds in multiple countries have used the tactic of hacking someone's computer, putting charlie papa content on it, and then using that as a reason for arrest. I'm with you that partaking in it is completely unexcusable and sick, however that fact is why it's used by governments to gain more control. "Think of the children."
  
  I have heard of this happening. It is why I have a healthy distrust and dislike of law enforcement. Law enforcement serves the wealthy, powerful, and the interests of the state itself. It is almost like the wealthy have their own paramilitary to do their bidding for them.
- Why can't I downvote this?
  I just noticed that lemmy doesn't have downvotes lol.
  
  It depends on the instance you signed up with. Mine, and it looks like yours, doesn't have downvotes. It's the host's decision. Annoying at times like this, huh?
  
  Lemmy has downvotes, but some specific instances (servers) do not allow them.
  
  I did it

we should have separate dark web(no CP) and dark web(CP)
- Yes we should. How would you go about doing that?
  
  Put it in the dark web's terms of service.
  
  Start two dark webs, fill one with CP... and all the CP users will go to that one? Or something /s
  
  Put a CP detector at dark web(no CP) exit nodes and throttle the speed to shit when triggered?
- How would that possibly work?

A good read, thanks for sharing

118 comments