Re:Germany to make it a crime to run a Tor node or website
by AnthonyMouse on Friday March 15, 2019 @01:48PM
(#19402219)
> While that's perhaps an interesting question in the general case, for Tor, we know the purpose was to protect US covert intelligence communications overseas, which is very much about enabling illegal (by local law) activity.
Made all the more problematic by the question of whose purpose should be used. It's a piece of open source software with multiple contributors, one of which may or may not be the node operator. So whose purpose do we use? The US Navy? The EFF? The node operator? They may each have a different purpose.
> And actually, purpose requirements in law are not uncommon and, in systems with meaningful proof requirements that benefit they accused, since they provide additional facts which must be established by evidence before punishment can be imposed.
Purpose requirements are typically sentence intensifiers for things that are already illegal. Illegal entry is trespass but illegal entry with intent to commit a separate crime is burglary.
The problem here is that the other requirements are completely normal behavior and it's the purpose requirement which is doing all the work. If you take it away you don't have a sensible prohibition on something wrong which the purpose requirement only makes harder to prove, you have a nonsense law that prohibits ordinary upstanding behavior. In other words, without the purpose requirement there would not sensibly be any law against this to begin with, and that is what would really benefit the accused.
Made all the more problematic by the question of whose purpose should be used. It's a piece of open source software with multiple contributors, one of which may or may not be the node operator. So whose purpose do we use? The US Navy? The EFF? The node operator? They may each have a different purpose.
> And actually, purpose requirements in law are not uncommon and, in systems with meaningful proof requirements that benefit they accused, since they provide additional facts which must be established by evidence before punishment can be imposed.
Purpose requirements are typically sentence intensifiers for things that are already illegal. Illegal entry is trespass but illegal entry with intent to commit a separate crime is burglary.
The problem here is that the other requirements are completely normal behavior and it's the purpose requirement which is doing all the work. If you take it away you don't have a sensible prohibition on something wrong which the purpose requirement only makes harder to prove, you have a nonsense law that prohibits ordinary upstanding behavior. In other words, without the purpose requirement there would not sensibly be any law against this to begin with, and that is what would really benefit the accused.