[heffer]

Germany had this principle in place for a while for internet. It's called "Störerhaftung". Just google it and see the craziness that ensued. Led to exactly the kind of court cases you'd expect to see: grandmas paying to settle lawsuits for people abusing their misconfigured WiFi, AirBnB hosts paying for their tenants' torrenting. This gave rise to movements like Freifunk which allowed people to share an open WiFi that in many cases just tunnelled back the internet traffic to central exit points using IPs assigned to registered charities that were, for all intents and purposes, classified as ISPs and therefor exempt from this secondary liability. Another nice twist was that German privacy law only requires (and sometimes only allows) ISPs to store information about their customers needed for billing purposes. But because the service is free there is no billing and thus no information about the customer is known and nothing can be provided to courts or law enforcement as a result.

I've been running one of these Freifunk networks in my hometown since 2013. In all these years I only really had law enforcement reach out 4 or 5 times. One from Austria, the rest from Germany. One for CSAM, one for bomb threats, the rest were about fraud. After explaining the situation to them I never heard back.

[dannyw]

I run a Tor exit node (not just relay) in Australia from my residential home for about a decade now, and I’ve gotten contacted by multiple law enforcement officials now, although not frequently anymore.

Thankfully each and every one was resolved quickly when I explained I run a Tor exit node, to help people in dictatorships bypass their censorship. I’m surprised actually.

It’s probably on file somewhere which is why I haven’t been hassled for years now.

[chii]

and one day, you're gonna get a knock on your door, and some law enforcement officers will ask you very nicely to install a backdoor or a wiretap onto your tor exit node.

[amiga386]

They wouldn't need to. They'd ask his residential ISP to monitor him instead.

If you're using Tor, take it as a base assumption that the exit node is logging your traffic, or even modifying your http traffic.

Tor's value is in concealing the association between your visible access of an entry node, with visible activity on an exit node.

[dannyw]

That’s right, Tor doesn’t mean your traffic is completely hidden for the public web. It just attempts to break the link.

The list of exit nodes are public, it’s not a difficult exercise for Five Eye to intercept like >90% of its traffic through the ISP or backbone level.

[BobaFloutist]

I really wish there was a paradigm where we could track people down for death/bomb threats(/swatting)/CSAM, but where the police were genuinely prohibited from accessing the same information for anything less. I guess the missing link between CSAM and piracy is probably fraud/scams? It's pretty hard to argue that law enforcement should be allowed to track someone down for an implausible death threat but not for stealing tens of thousands of dollars from a senior citizen, but then it's harder to establish a clear line between fraud/scams and piracy. I guess with fraud/scams you can just track the cash and not the other vectors?

I dunno, I have similar feelings about license plate cameras and CCTV. I don't think there's any big mysterious reasons why I can, in five minutes, imagine a system that's actively protected from abuse, but somehow it's never what's proposed, I think it's because privacy advocates tend to be opposed to the people giving cops new toys so all the proposals for giving cops new toys have minimal input from privacy advocates. It's a bummer.

[aidenn0]

The principle in question here is very different; the ISP itself has been found liable for contributory infringement.