German Police Harrass Tor Server Admin
Who is brave enough to run a Tor exit node when this kind of thing happens:
On Sunday morning, 00:15 AM, July the 29th, someone knocked on my door very hard. I just came back from a pub-crawl with a friend from the UK, was quite drunk, opened the door and just heard “Police!”. They entered my appartment, cuffed me and started to search my flat. My wife was scared to death. I was held in my own kitchen for almost 30 minutes asking “WTF is that about?” when they just said “Calm down, we’ll explain everything later”.
Minutes later they explained me that I’m suspected of placing a bomb-threat at a german copper-forum called copzone.de – a forum I never heard about. They accused me of posting shit like “I’ll plant a bomb in the department of work” and that I was about to cut-throat (or something like that, I can’t remember, I was drunk) a worker from that department. (Edit: The posting at copzone.de doesn’t seem to be accessible. Since my lawyer doesn’t have the files yet, I don’t know what exactly was posted. The german police doesn’t hand over the files to the suspect, he has to hire a layer to see the files.)
I explained them that I was a Tor-operator and what Tor is about. I showed them the letters from the Feds from the earlier incident to proove that I’m not bullshitting them. However, the coppers weren’t not so much into Tech-stuff and told me that a forensic unit will care about all my equippment. They searched everything: My attic, my office, my car, they digged through my wifes underwear, they found my old chmistry books very interesting, the flak-vest I own which I use when I go to strange countries, they found the fertilizer which I use for my chilli-plants, my microcontroller-experiments looked like an IED to them: Basically, EVERYTHING was suspicious.
Fortunately for this fellow, the police eventually realized their mistake:
Hours later, on the same sunday, someone from the “Staatsschutz” (something like the DHS) of the city of Düsseldorf came to unlock my door, telling me something like “uh, we screwed up, sort of”. That’s not what he said, but that’s the bottomline.
Reading this story, I wish that I could route the Düsseldorf police department’s internet connection through servers in China, so they could see first hand the usefulness and necessity of Tor.
Tags Tor, Civil Liberties
