William was raided for running a Tor exit node. Please help if you can.

Thu Nov 29 20:26:57 UTC 2012

Communications Decency Act, 47 U.S.C. §230 is the US law that has been 
interpreted to provide immunity to ISP for the actions of their users.

Zeran v. America Online, Inc., 4th Circuit, 1997
Jane Doe v. America Online, Inc., 5th Circuit, 1997
Blumenthal v. Drudge, DC District, 1998
Green v. AOL, 3rd Circuit, 2003
Gentry v. eBay, Inc, California Appeals, 2002
Delfino v. Agilent Technologies, California Appeals, 2006

The ISP ones are most relevant here, but look at these cases.

The situation would be complicated if the ISP ran the TOR exit node 
themselves, and that would be a messy legal battle I'm sure.

Either way, that doesn't change the fact that running a TOR exit on a 
home PC on a residential internet connection is silly. You might legally 
not be held responsible at the end of the day, but it just may cost you 
a lot in legal fees to get there.

Personally, I have better things to spend money on.

On 11/29/2012 3:06 PM, George Herbert wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 29, 2012 at 11:58 AM, Tom Beecher <tbeecher at localnet.com> wrote:
>> Not really comparable.
>>
>> Speaking from a US point of view, ISPs has strong legal protections
>> isolating them from culpability for the actions of their customers. I know
>> internationally things are different, but here in the US the ISP doesn't get
>> dinged, except in certain cases where they are legally required to remove
>> access to material and don't.
>>
>> End users have no such protections that I'm aware of that cover them
>> similarly.
>>
>>
>> On 11/29/2012 2:50 PM, George Herbert wrote:
>>> On Thu, Nov 29, 2012 at 11:18 AM, Tom Beecher <tbeecher at localnet.com>
>>> wrote:
>>>> Assuming it's true, it was bound to happen. Running anything , TOR or
>>>> otherwise, that allows strangers to do whatever they want is just folly.
>>> Such as, say, an Internet Service Provider business?
> There are plenty of ISPs with no or little customer contracts; anyone
> running open access wireless.  Plenty of "open access" sites with free
> accounts.
>
> And any but the largest ISPs are "end users" of upstream bandwidth.
>
> The analogy of a small free access ISP and a Tor exit node is legally
> defensible.  I know of five, six, seven that I can think of off the
> top of my head that are run by people I know, one of whom has started
> and/or been architect or operations lead for 5 or more commercial
> ISPs.
>
> Even more, ISP like protections are extended in the US to many "end
> user" sites such as blogging sites, Wikis, etc; where the site is
> "publishing" content but not creating it or exerting control over it,
> etc.
>
> This is US specific, and the case of a user in Austria is entirely
> unrelated to US law, but I don't know that this type of response would
> hold up in US court for these reasons.  I am going to ping my internet
> law contacts in the US and see what they think, as IANAL.
>
>

-- 
Thomas Beecher II
Senior Network Administrator
LocalNet Corp.
CoreComm Internet Services
716-799-8881
tbeecher at localnet.com