| > Do you think that defense is going to keep the courier out of prison? Yes. That happens every day. > It sounds like Germany is treating Tor operators as common carriers, That's probably because they basically are common carriers. And the service isn't particularly designed for illegal activity, even it can be useful for that. It's especially not designed for activities that tend to be illegal in the "free world". > in most countries the node operators are probably not met with such leniency. The Tor network has been running for about 20 years. There are on the order of thousands of relays. Unlike users, relay operators aren't anonymous; there's a public list of their IP addresses. The relays are all over most of Europe, especially Western Europe, and the Americas, especially the US and Canada, with a not-insignificant number of them in other countries. So far as I know, nobody's ever been arrested, let alone convicted, for running a Tor relay. If they have, it's been in the sort of country where you also get arrested for running a newspaper. That may change soon, but it's still the case so far. Oh, and a good chunk of the funding for development (but not relay operation) comes from the US government. You say "leniency", I say "not being an authoritarian hellhole". |