I would hope that authorities at least would try to build an actual case against you and not just raid your home because of some fraudulent traffic from your IP. I might be too optimistic in that regard.
1: it makes me angry to think about it
2: I have other, positive things I'd rather do
It took them 8 months to return the ~$10k of gear they "stole" from me, and they found nothing.
No apology, no explanation of how I was somehow caught up in their data, just "come collect your stuff".
Ironically, they traumatized my kids (I don't think they even did any background checks on me - I don't believe they even knew there were kids in the house before they barged in).
Luckily my kids are resilient and we can sometimes even joke (bitterly) about it.
I should also make the point that, with one exception, the officers conducting the raid were polite.
Don't feel bad for asking.
I do want to "get it out", and one of the things holding me back is "what's the best way of doing it" (along with "what's not going to invite further negative police attention").
Along with a family member, we've approached our local government representative for advice on how to go about pursuing some kind of action that might help "make the system better" to minimise the incidents of innocent parties being subjected to the violence of the state, but it's mostly been a dead end. But I also don't want it to be what defines the rest of my life either, and pursuing this kind of thing could easily end up eating who I am currently (and I'm quite happy with my current self).
I also don't want media attention, really, in any context.
Now I'm mostly just writing this to understand my own motivations...
Man I really feel this part, though admittedly for a shorter-lived and much simpler reason so I don’t want you to think that I think I fully get it.
My wife and I had two officers walk into our apartment when we were a younger couple. Unannounced, 1 or 2am. Just lights shining around and I jumped up looking for a blunt object. They then announced themselves. Mind you we live in an incredibly gun, friendly state, so if they have done this is somebody else, it is incredibly likely they would’ve had a gun drawn on them, and who knows how it would have gone down. They let themselves in because “the door was unlocked and they were looking for someone.” Mind you to get to our apartment wasn’t a simple thing. You had to walk around a gravel parking lot and up these rear steps. We lived above a restaurant and all that jazz.
I didn’t do anything about it after they left. I just kind of wanted to forget the situation and not think about what could have been. Think god I am white and didn’t have a gun on me, I’ll just leave it at that.
We didn’t even talk about it until probably 5 or 6 years later. What you wrote above made me better realize why.
A lot of people will simply see the headline, assume you're guilty and treat you as such. And a lot of people are willing to treat those they think are pedophiles very very badly (there was a case recently where a murderer serving life in jail killed his pedophile cellmate) Anyone that knows about this incident will probably never allow you to be around kids unattended, regardless of your innocence. You will be a social pariah.
Innocent until proven guilty had to be enshrined in law because most people will treat you guilty until proven innocent, and they don't have much concern about forgetting the 'proven innocent' bit.
But if p2p exit nodes were orders of magnitude more common, then the burden of proof would indisputably be the responsibility of the prosecutors, since anyone could credibly claim "someone else did it."
And that's why this trope of "but what if someone does bad stuff on your network?!" is so frustratingly self-defeating: if everyone just ignored that risk, then everyone could have a p2p exit node, and the risk would be mitigated. It's a sort of prisoner's dilemma where nobody wants to be the early adopter of a system that would, on the whole, benefit all of us.
A society is difficult to surveil when everyone uses Tor as both a client and an exit node, and onion routing is the default method of exchanging packets (some might say it should have been incorporated into the original design of the internet). So it's perhaps worth noting that adversaries of society, such as the NSA or FBI, have a great incentive to perpetuate fearmongering about p2p networks and the threat of "but whatabout muh criminals on muh network!"
If you're reading this, maybe it's time to setup a Tor relay (with config flag `ExitRelay 1`).
I think I'm more cynical about our justice system, but the way I see it, this just gives them ammunition to go after anybody on a whim. Simply getting tangled up in the justice system, even if innocent, is an expensive and stressful thing. Most of us do not have the resources to just have a dedicated team of lawyers taking care of everything. So if everyone was running a Tor exit node, and it was known that there was CSAM accessed through some of them, an overzealous prosecutor could probably push through at least a search warrant of your computers because as a Tor exit node runner, there's a reasonable chance that CSAM was accessed via your node. You're not getting your stuff back for a while if that happens.
As it stands, there's already a certain level of injustice, because corporations like Google and Microsoft facilitate all sorts of illegal communications, and the worst that happens is they get a letter from the feds asking them nicely for their subscriber's information. The investigators don't jump to the conclusion that the CEO of Google is a child predator and seize all the Google servers. But for an independent system admin on a home network, that's exactly what they do, even though there's no fundamental difference other than the size of the operation (and the implicit assumption that exit relays are unusual, which is the unfair assumption I'm trying to draw attention to as an explanation for lack of plausible deniability on the part of the idealistic sysadmin in a world where exit nodes are unusual).
This is impossible in practice though, so while an interesting thought experiment, it has little bearing on reality. Your local court isn't going to be running a Tor exit node on their systems. Your friendly nearby S&P500 corp isn't going to be running Tor exit nodes on their systems. Your local public library probably won't either.
> They can't seize everyone's hardware.
With your thought experiment, yes, but in practice that's not going to be the case. You're more likely to end up with very selective enforcement instead -- if you run a Tor exit node, the justice system can effectively blackmail you because at the very least they can cause you a very expensive headache. "Shame if we had to get a search warrant to make sure it wasn't you downloading some CSAM"
"Arrest first, deal with nerds protesting their innocence later" still involves getting arrested.