Carnegie Mellon Kills Black Hat Talk About Identifying Tor Users

[silicon_toad2000]

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140721/11362227955/carnegie-mellon-kills-black-hat-talk-about-identifying-tor-users.shtml

There's been plenty of speculation about what's going on, but Chris Soghoian has a pretty good thesis that the researchers likely didn't have institutional approval or consent of the users they were identifying, meaning that they were potentially violating wiretapping statutes. As he notes, running a Tor server to try to spy on Tor traffic without talking to lawyers is a very bad idea. While it hasn't yet been confirmed that this is what happened, it certainly is a pretty sensible theory.

Of course, none of that changes the fact that it's possible to identify some Tor users. But... that's also not particularly new. In fact, we've discussed in the past how the feds can identify Tor users. Tor adds an important layer of protection, but there are plenty of ways that you can still be identified while using Tor. Just ask Russ Ulbricht. The problem isn't so much Tor itself but how people use it -- and the simple fact is that most people use it in a way that will eventually reveal who they are. While it's not definite, it seems likely that this is what the talk would have revealed. Shutting it down wasn't any sort of big attempt to cover up this fact, but perhaps it was to protect the researchers and CMU (potentially) from a lawsuit for violating wiretapping laws.

[GhostShip]

The mention of potentially breaking criminal wiretapping laws is a seriously inane red herring, to commit a criminal act the person must have criminal intent this is the basis of nearly all criminal law, the criminal act and the criminal intent, no trails are usually brought if one or the other is missing, these precepts are the keystones of most countries criminal law, Actus reus and Mens rea are the legal terms to look up, the facts here are plain that the activity is undertaken with a research view in mind and may even have legitimate application for future law enforcement thus by sticking to this ethos they have not in fact broken any law and thus cant be prosecuted as long as they have documented their project in such a way as to show they are simply undertaking research that may be of interest to academia, even if no one else.