The office and home of a group that cooperates with the anonymous communication system 'Tor' were raided by police, and the executives requested replacement
The anonymous communication system '
[tor-relays] Artikel 5 eV - Another police raid in Germany - general assembly on Sep 21st 2024 - Mailing Lists / tor-relays - Tor Project Forum
https://forum.torproject.org/t/tor-relays-artikel-5-ev-another-police-raid-in-germany-general-assembly-on-sep-21st-2024/14533
Tor is a technology that anonymizes the connection path, rather than concealing the content of the communication itself. When a user accesses a desired page (such as google.com) from their computer, multiple relay points ( nodes ) such as other computers are added to the communication path, and anonymity is maintained by encrypting everything except the exit node, which is the final access path.
Nodes, which are the key to anonymous communication through Tor, are operated by volunteers and organizations that support the Tor philosophy. One of the organizations that operates exit nodes, Germany's Artikel 5 eV , reported on the Tor Project forum on September 8, 2024 that it had been 'subjected to a raid by German police.'
According to Gero Kühn, an executive at Artikel 5 eV, German police raided the group's registered address, a home and office, on August 16, 2024. This is the second raid since 2017, and Kühn said, 'It's clear that there are people in German law enforcement who think that harassing NGOs that operate nodes will lead to the deanonymization of Tor users.'
Compared to the 'non-technical people' who requested the search, the police officers who actually searched his house were more technically knowledgeable and did not seize anything except for the broken intermediate node and exit node application documents. Nevertheless, armed police officers stayed in Kühn's living room for an hour and a half and asked for his cooperation in a threatening manner. Kühn plans to file a legal challenge against the warrant that authorized the search so that such a situation will not happen again.
'Providing my personal address or office space as the registered address of an NGO is not tenable as long as operating an exit node carries with it the risk of further raids. I no longer want to take this risk,' Kühn said, announcing his resignation from Artikel 5 eV's board of directors.
Artikel 5 eV will hold a general meeting on September 21 to provide a new registered address for the organization and recruit new officers to continue operating the exit node. If the replacement of officers is not successful, the group will discuss options such as ceasing operation of the exit node or liquidating the entire organization and distributing the budget to other non-profit organizations.
This incident has also become a hot topic on the social news site Hacker News.
Another police raid in Germany | Hacker News
A user who once ran a Tor exit node said, 'One of the reasons I stopped running an exit node was harassment from law enforcement agencies,' and that he received three subpoenas from his hosting provider in the five years he operated it. Two of them were about 'someone sending a bomb threat email to the university' and 'someone sending a phishing email' through the exit node, but the third was about 'a hacker in Qatar hacking.' Fortunately, the Tor Project and the Electronic Frontier Foundation helped him free of charge, but he said he had to hand over his account information to the Department of Justice and submit an affidavit.
Another user pointed out that law enforcement agencies would likely raid Tor exit node operators not to identify anonymous users, but to harass them into abandoning the operation of the exit node.
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