Tor anonymity server admin arrested

Over at CNET, Chris Soghoian (huh, he's blogging there now) blogs:

In a recent blog posting, a German operator of a Tor anonymous proxy server revealed that he was arrested by German police officers at the end of July. Although he was released shortly afterwards, information about the arrest had been kept quiet until his lawyers were able to get the charges dropped.

(...) The police were investigating a bomb threat posted to an online forum for German police officers. The police traced one of the objectionable posts on the forum to the ip address for Janssen's server. Up until his arrest, Alex Janssen's Tor server carried over 40GB of other random strangers' Internet traffic each day.

Showing up at his house at midnight on a Sunday night, police cuffed and arrested him in front of his wife and seized his equipment. In a display of both bitter irony and incompetence, the police did not take or shut-down the Tor server responsible for the traffic they were interested in, which was located in a different city, over 500km away.

Link

[#1 posted by mikelotus , September 16, 2007 10:11 PM]

This is the second time this has happened in Germany. I believe the first time was because of child pornography being posted where the final IP was from a Tor server. That server's owner was eventually exonerated without having to go to court.

[#2 posted by Mechphisto , September 17, 2007 7:46 AM]

Yikes! I know the more people who run Tor servers the better it helps everyone...but it's things like this that really make hesitant to run my Tor as a server. :(