Tor Project Sued

Tor Project Sued.

The above link is a "Service of Process" document from the Secretary of State of the State of Texas:
RE: Shelby Conklin VS Pinkmeth.Com aka pinkmethuylnenlz.onion.lt and The Tor Project Inc.

Texas lawyer sues Tor for providing tools used by revenge porn site.

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-- Tom

 

Yep, here we go. Another case of *insert per TOS here of the F lettered variety* using it for things they should be shot for, and ruining it for the rest of us by further associating Tor with crime usage.

 

It seems that the plaintiff is back-pedalling: http://totalfratlaw.com/TORPressRelease.pdf.

They were arguing that Tor is effectively an ISP for hidden services

Also, for historical context: http://pastebin.com/w66dKwzK.

I thank Rick and The Doctor on tor-talk for the links.

 

Not surprising that the law firm didn't do their homework after reading that press release from the Van Dyke Lawfirm.
There are 2 obvious typos in it yet Jason Van Dyke apparently put his signature on the document.

All this could be mute someday though. Because tor is so effective, those who profit from illegal activity will more and more outnumber legitimate users. At some point, there will be a coordinated effort from legislative bodies around the globe to shut it down.

 

Millions of people use Tor every day. Most of them are probably evading censorship. And whatever they're doing, they provide cover traffic for US etc agents. So I doubt that it will get shut down.

 

http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/201...sued-for-enabling-revenge-porn-site-pinkmeth/

 

I wonder what changed his mind so quickly. Integrity? Good Tor PR?

 

Mirimir, I expected something like this to happen and with held my comment for the moment. With regard to TOR one must first understand that the project was originally funded by the Department of the Navy and has been used for years for covert activity. I have a deep suspicion that Van Dyke was contacted by the government and politely told that it was in his best interest to back off the TOR project.

 

I think he probably just realized trying to "sue tor" would be like suing a electric supply company for a faulty appliance.

 

@RollingThunder, @Veeshush

Both somewhat, probably. The US government has a love/hate thing with Tor

 

Why would they (the USA government) hate Tor?

 

Prosecutors and FBI agents, for example, expect everything to have a backdoor for legitimate court-approved investigation, excepting of course as protected Constitutionally. Tor is rather orthogonal to them, I think.

 

Mirimir,

They hate TrueCrypt as much as they hate TOR. Those two in tandem have them less than happy!! LOL!!

 

@ Mirimir - With regard to the love hate thing, I guess it depends on who you are in the gov't. If you were working in intelligence you would probably love TOR. However for whistle blowing etc I would imagine not so much. You bring up prosecutors and FBI. This has been hashed over in the past but for the risk of being redundant, Quantum and Foxacid are codename NSA exploits that can potentially affect Firefox and a systems firmware and the far end. My point is that there has never been a backdoor to TOR. Targeted exploits, yes, backdoor no. However since it is you I am responding to Mirimir your articles on iVPN would potentially nullify even those exploits.

 

@RollingThunder OK, "backdoor" was perhaps the wrong word. Maybe "workaround" is better.

Regarding the NSA, the Snowden leaks overall imply that it's not easy for them to compromise Tor users on a large scale using network attacks (traffic analysis of mass intercepts) or relay (Sybil) attacks. So they use targeted exploits. But from what I've read, Sybil attacks by research groups can compromise substantial percentages of Tor users over several months. And the NSA has orders of magnitude more resources. However, from recent discussion in tor-talk, I get that Sybil attacks on Tor aren't so much limited by adversary resources as they are by oversight. When there's an influx of new relays, Tor developers get very curious. And if there's anything fishy, they may well just nuke them.

You may find amusing that my multiple-workspace ideas come out of experience in explosives development

 

It is not very clever, first try to kill TrueCrypt now the attack TOR. In Europe it is already very visible to what actions this results.
Didn't they learn anything from the Prohibition ?
(Wiki: Alcohol ban Prohibition in the United States was a nationwide Constitutional ban on the sale, production, importation, and transportation of alcoholic beverages that remained in place from 1920 to 1933.)