German TOR Servers Seized 427
mrogers writes "Servers participating in the TOR anonymizing network have been seized by public prosecutors during a child porn crackdown in Germany. TOR provides anonymity for clients and servers by redirecting traffic through a network of volunteer-operated relays; the German prosecutors may have been trying to locate an anonymous server by examining the logs of the captured relays."
legal basis (Score:4, Interesting)
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http://world4.monstersgame.co.uk/?ac=vid&vid=4701
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Re:legal basis (Score:5, Informative)
Re:legal basis (Score:5, Insightful)
running tor on a server is NOT the reason these people were targetted.
I disagree. Running TOR is exactly the reason they were targeted. There may be nothing illegal about running TOR, but there is no denying the chilling effect of the government seizing people's computers on the kiddie porn pretext. The fewer people running TOR, the fewer people who can freely criticize governments--any governments, not just those in China.
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Re:legal basis (Score:5, Insightful)
Yet.
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Translation: You're neither important nor dangerous enough.
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Meta-Translation: you are deluded into thinking that you are.
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Re:legal basis (Score:5, Insightful)
But when the time comes that people are getting "disappeared" for criticizing the government, I'd rather that TOR existed than not. If we let TOR get disassembled now because of "think of the children" issues, we'll be screwed in the future when we really need it.
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Not even the Founding Fathers believed that; that's why we have the 2nd Amendment.
Ben Franklin (from here [fff.org]):
Thomas Jefferson:
Re:legal basis (Score:5, Insightful)
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I just don't live in a country where the Gendarmes can say that certain public meetings (for example, to protest a new labor law) are illegal.
Nor do I live in a country where people think "riot" and "legitimate protest" are synonyms.
Maybe you should get your own affairs in order before you start slinging horseshit across the pond.
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Police dogs loosed on recruitment protestors [objector.org]
Other protestors arrested [washingtonpost.com]
Veteran arrested on Veteran's day for reading an editorial out loud [commondreams.org]
Not arrested, just confined behind barbed wire [washingtonpost.com]
Military treating Quakers like terrorists [csmonitor.com]
Grandmother arrested over "Investigate Florida Votergate" sign [aclufl.org]
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1.found childporn-forum
2.get the logfiles from the forum
3.get your hands on every machine mentioned in the logfiles to find additional evidence
It is important to note that the servers were siezed after a judge autorized the siezure. Once they notice that they cannot gain any info from the servers, they will be returned.
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HAAAAAAAAHAHAHAH! That's hilarious.
5 years from now, once the machines are basically worthless, they'll be "returned" with severe damage and missing hard drive.
Re:legal basis (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:legal basis (Score:5, Insightful)
Use of Tor (Score:3, Informative)
Re:legal basis (Score:5, Insightful)
A machine connects to a child porn website. The website server records its IP address. The police obtain the server's logs, locate the suspicious machine and are informed by its owner that it's a Tor node.
Should the police:
If it is a 100% legitimate Tor node, then the police won't find anything untoward. But the police still have to check - because otherwise, "I was running a Tor node, honest guv'nor!" could become a standard get-out-of-custody-free card for anyone else whose computer is under investigation.
Re:legal basis (Score:4, Insightful)
... But the machine could potentially be both a Tor node and be responsible for accessing the child porn website - without the aid of some separate, anonymous request routed over Tor. One hypothetical case would be a desktop machine that also runs a Tor node in the background. Without a close look at the machine, the police have no sensible way of telling.
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FTFA:
Shame on them, investigating computers used to access child pornography. And as for
What the fuck does this have to do with anything? (I browse with signatures disabled, so no, that is not a signature.)
Re:legal basis (Score:5, Informative)
Note that, due to the way Tor works, seizing the Tor exit nodes won't help track down the actual people responsible in any way. (Even if they had full access logs, which I somehow doubt, all each node knows is the previous step in the routing chain, not where the connection originated). It will, however, help scare people off running Tor nodes quite nicely.
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And that basic point empowers to do anything they want to anyone.
I'm sure that child pornography is so terrible, that you really would be okay to shoot them-- and by extension anyone who had anything to do with them.
And what is so fantastic about this is- you can SEND people these particularly illicit images and then bust them for having it on their computer if you time it right! Given just a few seconds of access to any computer- you can load it up with these illicit images and then bust people.
Re:legal basis (Score:5, Insightful)
The excuse to seize the servers relies on the cops wanting to find any data of those web site users, which they won't, because of the way Tor is built.
Sad day for annonymous Internet, as more of the crap side of humanity uses services like Tor, and people who do need it, like people in China, are the ones burned.
Re:legal basis (Score:5, Insightful)
Sad day for annonymous Internet, as more of the crap side of humanity uses services like Tor, and people who do need it, like people in China, are the ones burned.
Did it ever occur to anyone that protecting governments--all governments, not just those in China--from opposition is the very reason for taking actions like this?
Think about it: do kiddie porn and terrorism really affect more people in the world than say, domestic violence, or alcohol abuse, or even theft? Do kiddie porn and terrorism affect more people than lack of food, lack of sanitary water, low wages, or disease? Do kiddie porn and terrorism affect more people than hurricanes and tsunamis? Do kiddie porn and terrorism affect more people than war, cluster bombs, or unexploded mines?
Ah, but where are government resources spent: fighting the scourge of kiddie porn and the battling terrorists lurking under every bed.
The point of these "fights" against kiddie porn and terrorism are to get people accustomed to giving up their rights and, sure enough, even in the U.S. our rights are rapidly being eroded. A supreme Court Justice from even 30 years ago would hardly recognize the U.S. today.
Re:legal basis (Score:5, Insightful)
If Tor users include Kiddie Porn, then Tor must be bad and eliminated. Especially if it interferes with policework. So start associating the two and eventually people will be happy to make other people give up their rights.
Re:And those in charge... (Score:3, Interesting)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6qX_BjzUJmg [youtube.com]
Watch in earnest as General Michael Hayden revises the 4th Amendment.
Re:legal basis (Score:5, Interesting)
I was going to rant about how TOR and Freenet should do some self policing and frankly I wish that they would. However I can also see how that could remove any type of common carrier status protection they may have.
Re:legal basis (Score:4, Insightful)
"The congress shall pass no law restricting the freedom of speech."
1st Amendment to the US Constitution. Anonymity is a prerequisite for truly free speech, and any judge who rules otherwise should be shot. The founders themselves published under pseudonyms in order to protect their identities while still spreading the word about their new government, for two reasons:
1. Anonymous writers do not have to deal with ad hominem attacks, meaning nobody can try to kill the message by attacking the messenger, and
2. People saying unpopular things tend to become the focus of alot of violence very quickly, and anonymous speech protects their lives.
The founders recognized that ideas are more important than stability and should be kept safe from force. THAT is the value in anonymity and that was one of the intentions behind the 1st Amendment.
Anyone who has read the Federalist Papers (or even a good review of them) would know that, and that damn well includes ANY judge ruling on ANY topic that might even HINT at a Constitutional issue.
Re:legal basis (Score:5, Funny)
Actually, under the auspices of the Because Act, this is entirely legal. This little known piece of international legislation is, in fact, at the heart of many of the most prominent legal actions in the world today. Much loved by the RIAA, MPAA and the US due to it's implicit allowal for random search and seizure, legal 'fishing trips', non-judicially warranted wire taps, and it's espousal of 'guilty until proven guilty' legislature; the entire text of the Because Act has been reproduced below: -
Because Act
1. Because.
1.1. Just, because.
You forgot; (Score:3, Funny)
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My parents used to use that one a lot... and I'd oh so foolishly tell them "there is no such law".
Seems I was wrong after all.
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In the UK they actually have another act, specifically to protect the right of governments to use the Because Act. It's the great Watchagonna do 'bout it? Act of 1843. It was enacted because Lord Featherbottom, a member of parliament, had been getting grief from a certain Mr. Parsley who had succesfully used the What defence against the good Lord. The court case was closely monitored in the media at the time, even though it has gone down in history as the most boring trial of all time. Excerpt from transcri
Re:legal basis (Score:4, Insightful)
Of course, comrade. If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.
Re:legal basis (Score:4, Insightful)
How long would they be gone? Would I ever get them back? Can they at least clone the disks for me so I can have my data back?
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Re:legal basis (Score:5, Interesting)
this is a very accurate answer....
NO.
well maybe, a friend got their PC back after 4 years and the drives were wiped. If the police take it, do not ever expect it back.
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Difference between ISPs and TOR (Score:3, Interesting)
1) Telcos let you get the CP.
2) TOR lets you get away with it.
ISPs don't anonymize your traffic and are complicit in government surveillance of it.
That said, I do most of my surfing through TOR just because I intrinsically hate the NSA spying on me. I use TOR for the sake of using TOR even though there are sites I can't go to anymore because of bans on TOR IPs thanks to bad actors. I've never liked people looking over my shoulder even when I'm doing absolutely nothing wr
Re:legal basis (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:legal basis (Score:5, Insightful)
But the people who had their equipment seized WEREN'T trading child porn (or at least, they've not been arrested or charged with that). They were just running a Tor node, which is perfectly legal, and something I do. So yes, I am worried.
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Re:legal basis (Score:5, Insightful)
Me: OMG My computer was stolen
My Friend: If there was no child porn on it you are ok
Me: What the fuck are you talking about? My COMPUTER IS GONE
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Well holy crap. By that standard, pictures of young girls in swimsuits on Yahoo! advertising hotel specials should result in Yahoo! getting ransacked and their advertising staff arrested.
But then, the point really isn't to make a coherent standard; it's to make anyone prosecutable so that you can pick and choose your v
Why Logs Are Bad (Score:3, Interesting)
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Eg https://www.spammimic.com/terms.shtml [spammimic.com]
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One problem with that idea - Tor doesn't keep logs, and anyone capable of analyzing a captured machine would know that. Therefore the police took these machines as more of a petulant "fuck you for exercising your rights and wanting anonymity" rather than as any plausible form of evidence.
Yes, we all need to fight to keep our rights eroding as slowly as possible (but still eroding, make no mistake - Thus the need for a legislative reboot, aka "revolution", eve
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Except you won't have much of a choice anymore. The EU has passed their Data Retention Act, in the US it looks like they're happy that AT&T bends over for them (not to mention they already have vastly expanded powers in the Patriot Act already, legally). JAP got slapped with an injunction that basicly said "short-circuit your anonymity, or we're shutting you down". The only ones you can "trust" are those you don't need to trust like open Wi-Fi spots, and networ
Is the polica incompetent or harassing? (Score:5, Interesting)
Tor can and does log data. (Score:3, Informative)
As far as I know and read the Tor documentation, Tor doesn't keep logs.
Read first [noreply.org], then post.
By default, Tor logs to the screen (it's called "standard out", or "stdout" for short) at log-level notice. However, some Tor packages (notably the ones for OS X, Debian, Red Hat, etc) change the default logging so it logs to a file, and then Tor runs in the background.
Tor logs (Score:5, Interesting)
So one would have to deliberately change several defaults to get logs with any data the cops might be interested in. From their point of view, worth a try, but unlikely to be fruitful.
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If I understand how TOR works, yes, they could. And they'd get loads of info on which node the request came from and to which node it was forwarded... here and there the site will be requested from that computer, but not much too often.
All in all, they most likely wouldn't get much out of it, just like they won't get anything out of this.
Except, of course, intimidating people who use TOR, which seems to be the primary reason the nodes were confiscated.
If all the people whose computers have been used in t
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I certainly don't support what they've done, but from their perspective they are doing the sensible thing and the appropriate thing. People should with-hold judgement for a little longer.
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As long as we're coming up with and condoning police actions that are 1)useless in accomplishing their stated goal, 2)harassing innocent citizens that have broken no laws, and 3)designed to imtimidate society and quell anything that might reduce police power and control... well, they could have gone in and shot the guys operating these TOR nodes. Would have been just as effective as confiscating their computers in finding out who the kiddie
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To me it seems like competent police work to hand this sort of thing to experts. To those who run TOR it sucks that law enforcement is a blunt instrument, but what choice does a competent cop have other than to "sieze all the computers and let the lab sort em out"?
Re:Is the polica incompetent or harassing? (Score:4, Informative)
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or either they are irritated by an anonymous network they can't control and try to harrass as many people using it as they can, to try to break it down
Bingo!
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Basically an open proxy (Score:3, Informative)
Automatic computer crime... (Score:4, Insightful)
Sexual crimes against children are some of the most monsterous things mankind can do - and they do occur with a very high frequency, and they are worth detecting and stopped at every opportunity. But like most conceptual wars on horrible things, it collateral damage can go out of control when unchecked. Here's hoping that this guy is innocent, and that his case can at least set some boundries on law are acceptable in this horrible issue.
Ryan Fenton
Re:Automatic computer crime... (Score:4, Informative)
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If this sort of thing were routine, it might make a good way to deal with botnets. Acquire botnet info, install tor on the zombies, get zombies confiscated. Later
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If "intentional act" equals "thoughtcrime", then all degrees of murder and manslaughter are equivalent. Law has a long basis of judging degree of guilt depending on intent, and for good reason: someone who did it intentionally is more likely do it again. This makes the most sense in the murder/manslaughter distinction, but also applies to e.g. 2nd degree murder (a crime of passion, unique to the situation) versus 1st degree murder (a planned murder, something that might become a pattern) versus 1st degree
Define Child (Score:5, Insightful)
Is taking nude photos of a girl who is 17 years and 11 months old some of the most monsterous (sic) things mankind can do? According to Albert Gonzalez it is. Is it monstrous to take nude photos of a woman made up to look like a young girl? Maybe your age limit should be 21 years to be sure.
The current withchunt on pedophiles fails to make a distinction between act against a 5 year old, and those of a seventeen year old. A Seventeen year old can be accepted in the army and carry a gun, but is not mature enough to make decisions about their own bodies. Makes sense to me...
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"very high frequency", now that's kind of vague.
Do you have any real stats? It doesn't appear that they are reported on the FBI's Uniform Crime Report [fbi.gov].
Re:Automatic computer crime... (Score:5, Insightful)
When I read words like these, I have to wonder if there is a purpose to such self-righteous posturing, or whether the poster expect everyone to share that leap of faith and assume it's relevant to the article or subject.
Hate to disturb any heads that might have been nodding in unison, but what the hell. A reasonable estimate is that 99.99% of the crap that would/could be found is the same crap that's been shovelled and re-shovelled through usenet as far back as I remember. Have a look some time. The only real crime to be found (with rare exceptions) is the crime you would commit by looking (i.e., downloading) and that crime, as far as I'm concerned, is a very technical one. As for everything else -- provocative, lewd, in bad taste, shameful -- I can think of lots of words, but an organised police hunt to track down a bunch of wankers downloading pictures protects no one and is a misplaced effort at best. If you're looking for likely targets of people who do, in fact, commit real crimes against children, you might start by looking at families -- aunts, uncles and close relatives. Those folks rarely take pictures, however, let alone publish evidence of their crimes for everyone on the the internet to share.
I'm reminded of something I heard not too long ago on a show hosted by that emotional snow-job of a wanna-be-anchor by the name of Anderson Cooper. He was speaking with some law enforcement officer who informed him with requisite officiousness that there were "over 100,000 child pornography sites" on the internet. Shit, you'd think with that many we'd all be tripping over them every day! But we don't. Go figure. The veteran reporter's reply was "Gee, I didn't know that."
Journalism at it's finest.
What does exists, to varying degrees, is the content from a bunch o teen modelling sites (many in the US) and a few websites here and there that are most likely run by Russian mafia that belong in the provocative, lewd, or in bad taste category (depending on one's jurisdiction, religeous affiliation and/or degree of interest in prurient matter). Criminals? Most likely, at least the Russian ones. But no monsters.
I use tor (Score:2)
Because my school's network is prejudiced against IRC connections. They last maybe all of 5 seconds. IRC over SSL works fine, but unfortunately not all networks support it. Only downside to using tor for IRC is that some idiots have gone and gotten some tor nodes glined (ie banned).
Luckily tor servers are run by people from all over the world. It would have to take a very large cooperative international effort in order to bring down tor... hopefully the majority of governments realize that would be a
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That's kind of the problem I have with tor. In the absence of better identifying information, how else do you fight abuse than by throwing the baby (good tor users) out with the bathwater (abusers using tor)? The same applies to whole networks that operate from behind NAT or proxies, etc.
to break the rules (Score:4, Interesting)
The point here is that certain 'freedoms' have costs and limits. Your demand to avoid the petty rules of your school about IRC is merely a matter of degree away from a child pornographers demand to view kiddie porn unmolested.
And meanwhile, with the current international paranoia, the powers that be will always be very interested in who doesn't want to be listened to.
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give it up for authoritarianism (Score:5, Interesting)
BY the time their goals are achieved the internet will probably be like an interactive version of MSNBC crossed with the home shopping network.
Anonymity and privacy online will be a thing of the past. All dissenting viewpoints will be monitored; no, wait, ALL viewpoints will be monitored.
Things like TOR which promote freedom and privacy will not be tolerated by these fasicsts, and they will find a way to subvert or desrtoy them - if the child porn argument doesn't work then they'll use the oldest trick in the book: There are terra-ists out there, they're gonna get us! We must take away your freedom to keep you safe. Give it up for safety, trust us, we know what's best and we have your best interest in mind.
Not for the unwashed masses, anyway. (Score:5, Interesting)
The rest of the unwashed masses are to be tagged and followed "for their own good" (according to the police).
If you listened to the police, they would jail everyone for their own good.
log(0) (Score:3, Insightful)
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Abuse? (Score:5, Informative)
What you are seeing is one abuse of the system. This abuse is not put into prospective. If it were we would have an idea of the amount of traffic the Tor network handles and compare that to the number of abuses we see. We can not condom the network or servers based on a soul abuse of the system!
Recently the president condemned Anonymous E-mail and pay as you go Cell phones and announced that we need to pass laws to stop it. This is just wrong! It is like saying that be for you can publish anything, you must ID your self. This is against everything that the founding Fathers stood for! The Federalist papers are a great example of that!
The Federalist Papers were a series of articles written under
the pen name of Publius by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison,
and John Jay. Madison, widely recognized as the Father of
the Constitution, would later go on to become President of
the United States. Jay would become the first Chief Justice
of the US Supreme Court. Hamilton would serve in the Cabinet
and become a major force in setting economic policy for the US.
Our founding Fathers hid there identity behind a pen name! So next time you condemn anonymity, remember that it is the way to have unwanted political views heard with out being persecuted for your ideas.
Are you a common carrier, or not? (Score:5, Insightful)
There are two views about "bad" information:
AFAIK, every government in the world, presumably in accordance with the will of the people, has laws that suggest their policy is based on the first view.
They differ in how they stress the details. Some might be more concerned with kiddie porn, some more concerned with copyright infringement, maybe some(?) are concerned about nuclear bomb plans or other classified information. Whatever. I haven't heard of any government that completely and absolutely protects all free speech (though counter-examples are welcome).
So let's think about what policies should exist, if we postulate that the first view (some kinds of information is "bad") represents "our" opinion. (If you disagree with this view, then you're going to hate the policy below.) Law Enforcement, civil lawyers, etc, are going to want some way to hold someone responsible when "bad" information gets spread.
The simplest approach is for The Man to get on the net and search for "bad" information and find someone to serve it to Him, and then go after whoever served it. Then either they get held responsible, or else they show how they're just a middleman and they point to who sent it to them. If they can't pass the buck, then the buck stops with them.
In the case of these pseudo-anonymous virtual networks, that means that if your TOR node passes packets containing kiddie porn (or copyrighted materials, or nuclear bomb plans, or an opinion piece about how the Nazi party should return to power in Germany) to an investigator and they come after you, then you are responsible for what your computer, acting as your agent, did. You're not a common carrier, unless you can show you were just a router and you can identify who sent you the packet so the investigator can continue to trace it back to the source.
So that's why TOR either needs to log, or else TOR operators need to deal with the fact that sometimes The Man is going to attack them. Are you going to pass the buck, or are you going to take responsibility?
What if you hold the second view, that information can't be bad and therefore no one ever has the right to try to prevent its spread? Well, you're in trouble. You live inside a legal environment that, frankly, does not agree with you. You can try to change that, but you're going to have an uphill battle against reality. So I recommend you lobby hard. If you're going to operate a TOR node prior to the lobbying completing its goal, be ready for when they take your computer and possibly press charges against you. Running a TOR node is dangerous and pisses off people who are more powerful than you, and it appears that the majority of people support the idea of this power being used against you. You understand what you're up against, right?
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Not your life, maybe.
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Re:USians did wtc... lol ! (Score:5, Insightful)
Tibet, anyone?
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Tibet, anyone?
Yes, but is China overthrowing governments RIGHT NOW? Tibet was what, almost 50 years ago? Now I'm not saying China is perfect by any means, but would you draw the same comparison with the Japanese? Their behavior during WWII (similar amount of time ago) was completely atrocious, yet you didn't pick on them. Why? I wonder if it has to do with your personal biases about the particular styles of government these countries now use.
In contrast, the US invasion of Iraq is a current event, whi
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Being an avid beer drinker myself I have to disagree with your "drinking can focus the mind" as alchohol prohibits brain activity on a biological level. And the other error "to take your mind off it for a few hours" is also equivalent to "escape". It is just as easy to go outside for a bit of fresh air, head out on a weekend trip, read a book, watch a movie, all are escapes. I challenge you to show how the drugs were not crippling our great thin
Re:Well, well, well (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Hark at the privicy freaks. (Score:5, Insightful)
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