Austrian Tor Exit Node Operator Found Guilty As an Accomplice 255
An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from TechDirt: Three years ago we wrote about how Austrian police had seized computers from someone running a Tor exit node. This kind of thing happens from time to time, but it appears that folks in Austria have taken it up a notch by... effectively now making it illegal to run a Tor exit node. According to the report, which was confirmed by the accused, the court found that running the node violated 12 of the Austrian penal code, which effectively says:"Not only the immediate perpetrator commits a criminal action, but also anyone who appoints someone to carry it out, or anyone who otherwise contributes to the completion of said criminal action." In other words, it's a form of accomplice liability for criminality. It's pretty standard to name criminal accomplices liable for "aiding and abetting" the activities of others, but it's a massive and incredibly dangerous stretch to argue that merely running a Tor exit node makes you an accomplice that "contributes to the completion" of a crime. Under this sort of thinking, Volkswagen would be liable if someone drove a VW as the getaway car in a bank robbery. It's a very, very broad interpretation of accomplice liability, in a situation where it clearly does not make sense.
Traffic laundering will soon become a crime (Score:5, Interesting)
We're moving, slowly but surely, towards making your IP address the equivalent of your social security number in the US.
It's accomplices all the way down! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Parents are all guilty (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:It's accomplices all the way down! (Score:2, Interesting)
Is the ISP an accomplice too? And the operating system vendor?
Are you really not able to see a difference between your examples and running a tor exit node?
Let me spell it out for you: ISP's are selling you a service but tracking you in order to make sure any people using their network for anything illegal can be traced, a tor exit node is designed to let people be anonymous and untraceable. The judge made the assumption that anyone who wants to be untraceable to law enforcement must be a criminal, which is actually not such a huge stretch.