Don’t look now, but…

I haven’t posted much on the privacy and anonymity front since getting pregnant, but I wanted to pass on a link in any event. Alex Janssen, a guy who runs a Tor server in Germany and who had promised never to shut down his server in spite of some groundless harassment from the German police, has shut down his Tor node; apparently, after last year’s baseless accusations of possessing kiddie porn, the police have come back this year to toss his apartment and accuse him of bomb and death threats, and when that didn’t pan out, he’s now being harassed about computer fraud.

What the Hell? The police obviously don’t understand how Tor works or what it is for, in spite of now having some experience with Tor operators, and yet even after being proven wrong again and again they still harass the same guy for various content that supposedly “came from” him.

I don’t blame the guy for shutting down the node - it’s one thing to hang on to an important ideal, but there are only so many lawyers fees and investigations - and so many groundless arrests - one can take before deciding that personal interest is more important than “the greater good”. Of course, I suspect this is what the police intend - if you can’t beat anonymous p2p networks by actual analysis or even shutting them down across the board, you can just scare the crap out of the operators until they cry uncle out of concern for their lives and family.

I might expect this kind of ignorance from our guys over here, but I expected rather more from the Germans…