I'm not familiar with Texas civil procedure, but assuming they follow the federal rules on this point, the complaint as to Tor is probably underspecified. In a complaint, a plaintiff does not have to make out her full factual case, but does need to make sufficient factual allegations to raise a cognizable claim.

To make out a case for civil conspiracy in Texas, you have to show: 1) a combination of two or more persons; 2) an unlawful purpose; 3) a meeting of minds as to the purpose; 4) one or more overt, unlawful, acts; 5) damages.[1]

The plaintiff here alleges that Pinkmeth and Tor had a "meeting of the minds" but it is insufficient to simply parrot one of the elements of the claim. The plaintiff must allege "enough facts to state a claim to relief that is plausible on its face." Bell Atlantic Corp. v. Twombly, 550 U.S. 544, 570 (2007). For example, the plaintiff must allege that someone affiliated with the Tor project provided Pinkmeth with technical support, from which we might infer a "meeting of the minds" as to the unlawful purpose. If the plaintiff can't make such an allegation, the complaint is probably going to get dismissed as to Tor.

[1] http://www.texas-opinions.com/law-civil-conspiracy.html

Yes, Texas courts may indeed be starting to follow the federal Twombly/Iqbal doctrine in view of a statutory change a couple of years ago. Recently, in a similar case, GoDaddy.com successfully persuaded a state appellate court to overturn a trial court's refusal to dismiss the plaintiff's complaint on that ground [1].

[1] http://www.jonesday.com/godaddycom-llc-v-toups-a-texas-appel...

That seems pretty outrageous.

Furthermore, the Tor network is not moderated, nor managed by the Tor project. The Tor project is more-or-less unrelated to the Tor network, and it certainly does not provide any "services" to users. The Tor Project is literally a software project, not a service or platform.

The Tor project simply develops on and provides the Tor core library, from which, other users have taken and made products like TorBrowser.

I guess if the TOR network went around and randomly blew up machines that connected over it that would be different...

Simply suing them because someone used the TOR network to hide their website is absolutely ridiculous.

> The Tor project simply develops on and provides the Tor core library, from which, other users have taken and made products like TorBrowser.

Note that this is not exactly true: Tor Browser is developed by the Tor Project (developed by tp.o's (the organization at torproject.org, which is incorporated as "Tor Project") people.)

At least my take on it is that the core network daemon "tor" is one of the things that tp.o people develop, but it's not the only thing/program.

Some of the programs developed and maintained by people who are tp.o developers: https://www.torproject.org/projects/projects.html.en

These and others comprise the broader ecosystem of Tor software. Many of the programs are (to use your word) (for all intents and purposes) "managed" by Tor Project (not only the core daemon.)

That's because Congress has specifically shielded them from such liability.

I think this is going to be interesting - as I think the plaintiff will win in Texas against both parties, and this could end up being a significant tort case, if it ends up in higher courts.

This is not one of those, and it's in Denton County, Texas - I don't know about their reputation otherwise or the geography.

In any case, it is simply wrong: the Tor Project most definitely do not host or provide domain name services to this site (and hidden service descriptors are not domain names but keys - the Tor software project has no control over them).

Cloudflare are the forward proxies to the hosting and would have knowledge of the real host (Tor do not), and their domain name registrar are OnlineNic.com, as 10 seconds of robtex.com lookup can easily show you! 10 seconds this lawyer didn't take.

I can appreciate the plaintiff is upset - rightfully so, in my opinion - if nude pictures of her have been uploaded to Pinkmeth.com without her permission. But the Tor project are software developers and don't have anything to do with the hosting of that site. Her lawyer has, to be polite, made a grave error of judgment.

Meh. The Tor people will spend a couple thousand dollars hiring a Texas lawyer to explain it to them and then they can file again. The plaintiff hasn't lost anything and will gain some free technical advice at the expense of a third party. Maybe the Tor people will even pay them a little cash to make them go away.

Really, the lawyer has gotten her a good start.

I guess it is because it is a for profit business, now. Since you can have your lawyer randomly sue people, have them spend thousands in lawyers to defend it, and end up settling anyway because the costs of lawyers over an exacerbated court case with an ignorant judge who will rule however the fuck they want can cost way more.

And honestly, the only way I can think to solve it is the public subsidy of lawyers in general, except in cases between the state and private individuals. In cases like this one, where its between two private parties, you should get at least free legal council, and even then you should be reimbursed for your time in court because it is wasting everyones time.

If the gov't wants to make an overbearing insane "justice" system that allows wanton abuse that creates a legal market as large as most useful commodity markets, they should pay for it. Which means we all pay for it. But at least then people can complain about the insane tax rates to pay for millions of lawyers and judges over literal bullshit.

I'm tired of people suing the wrong company because their own personal knowledge of a domain is minute, and their fundamental lack of understanding (and sometimes refusal to understand) is the catalyst for the suit.

> TOR also provides services that permit users, such as Pinkmeth, to "publish web sites and other services without needing to reveal the location of the site."

Perhaps they mean a user can use TOR to publish to Pinkmeth.com anonymously?

It seems this litigation has been going on since at least 2012 and Jason Van Dyke is still handling it with general attempts at litigating anyone and everyone who can be 'connected' in some way via 'the internet'.

I don't know if that's a common approach for Texas lawyers (one place I've never been) but it looks like this is some sort of ongoing 'war' against pinkmeth by Jason/Shelby. The tweets claiming to be from Jason are all pretty aggressive/out there and searches on Shelby Conklin are inconclusive even though it's a fairly unusual name. I wasn't even completely convinced she exists as described as the person in these papers.

Could this be some sort of publicity stunt ? Or am I just too suspicious ?

EDIT many edits

Edit: After reading the rest of the suit, this is clearly a frivolous suit. The entire filing is pretty unprofessional overall; hopefully the EFF can step in and stop this nonsense.

"Pinkmeth and TOR conspired to and had a meeting of the minds regarding the commission certain torts against Plaintiff more adequately described in paragraphs 5.1 - 5.15 above, as well as certain felony offense described in paragraph 4.8 and 4.9 above. The specific object to be accomplished by the conspiracy was the publication pornographic images of Plaintiff (and other women) on the Pinkmeth website"

I think "conspired" may be a little misguided here.

pp. 2-3

"According to its website, TOR "was originally designed, implemented, and deployed as a third-generation onion routing project of the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory. It was originally developed with the U.S. Navy in mind, for the primary purpose of protecting government communications." The TOR website further states that their products and services are used by individuals "to keep websites from tracking them and their family members, or to connect to news sites, instant messaging services, or the like when these are blocked by their local Internet providers." TOR also provides services that permit users, such as Pinkmeth, to "publish web sites and other services without needing to reveal the location of the site." [...] It is clear from the TOR website that TOR is knowingly assisting websites such as Pinhneth in committing torts against Texas resident..."

p. 5

"However, unscrupulous Internet service companies such as TOR offer "private" or "anonymous" domain name hosting services that allow criminals such as Pinkmeth and its users to escape accountability for their actions. TOR even advertises that with their service "nobody would be able to determine who was offering the site, and nobody who offered the site would know who was posting to it." [...] many unscrupulous companies offer services that allow illegal websites such as Pinkmeth to remain anonymous and difficult for authorities to shut down. Indeed Pinkmeth's Twitter feed advertises its website as being a website "where your state laws don't apply.""

pp. 8-9

"The specific object to be accomplished by the conspiracy was the publication pornographic images of Plaintiff (and other women) on the Pinkmeth website in such a mannner so as to prevent its operators and users from being held civilly and criminally accountable for this unlawful behavior."

This seems to be conflating a few things. The fact that "revenge porn" sites exist outside of anonymous content distribution networks like TOR shows that anonymity wasn't a required component in the tort allegedely commited by Pinkmeth. There are many cases involving sites like that being taken down from public hosting providers. The fact that TOR could allegedly allow defendant to escape prosecution does not equate to a real conspiracy to assist defendant in escaping prosecution. A person hosting a costume party isn't automatically responsible for a murderer taking advantage of the anonymity to commit a crime, without some evidence of collusion.

She has a real lawyer representing her.

He does have a pic of himself photoshopped into a courthouse. Weirdly floating at the bottom of this page: http://vandykelawfirm.com/index-2.html

Are you insinuating that Texas lawyers as a mass are bad or good?

This would be like someone commenting on a Java article by saying, "I'm not a programmer, let alone a Java programmer."

I didn't read any insult in his comment.