[jacquesm]

This is one of the reasons I never felt that I could run a TOR or freenet node in good conscience.

They have good uses but I can think of plenty of bad uses and I suspect that the bad uses will outnumber the good uses at any moment in time.

[logfromblammo]

By Blackstone math, it is better than ten guilty men go free than one innocent be punished.

How many pedo-pervs would you allow to trade images such that one political dissident may speak without fear of persecution?

[jacquesm]

Absolutely, but that does not mean that I'm going to have to enable 10 guilty men to perpetrate their crimes.

If a political dissident would approach me I'd more than happily attempt to smuggle his words out of whatever dictatorship he or she is currently living in, that would be my call to make. But whoever gets unfettered access to my network interfaces is going to have to be known to me in person.

[logfromblammo]

If the dissident could approach you to ask for your help, he wouldn't need to. You have to gamble on opening up that channel for anyone to use.

You have to pick your Blackstone Number. If the actual ratio of criminal to innocent exceeds it, you should not participate in Tor. Otherwise, you should.

As for myself, I don't think I'd go as high as 10, but I might be willing to enable as many as 3 people to anonymously commit the worst information-based crime I can conceive without my knowledge to enable one person to achieve the greatest assistance possible from safe and unfettered access to information.

Unfortunately, if I run a Tor exit node, I am likely to experience government persecution as the identifiable scapegoat for all that criminal activity that I was willing to tolerate for the sake of helping one person in need. By prosecuting exit node operators for traffic passing through, government policy effectively sets the Blackstone Number for everyone to zero, and damns the innocent.

[jacquesm]

(1) I don't have to anything

(2) if someone is a dissident I'm willing to take significant risk on their behalf, but only after I've verified for myself that they are what they say they are.

I'm not entirely green in this respect, I've run a number of services that were borderline legal and have had numerous run-ins with the law because of this. I've decided for myself that the amount of abuse does not make it worth my while on the off chance that one day a dissident might make use of the service. Feel free to adjust your strategy according to what you believe is the right ratio, I've done this for myself already after building up a fair amount of experience with services that lent themselves a lot less to abuse than tor.