ANONYMOUSLY SURFING THE WEB AND CHILD PORN

TOR Project, Inc and “Onion Routing”

 

With the ever increasing regulation and data mining of users information, browsing habits and purchases, software to surf the web anonymously is becoming more and more popular.  One such service is TOR (TOR Project, Inc.), a free service that allows the user to join with other “volunteers” to cycle web browsing through a group or “nodes” of computer.  The idea is the users browsing requests are run through a group of computers that make up the node and when it comes out the end, it could be one of a number of computers in the node whose IP address is recorded.  This makes it impossible to track the computer the request originated in, but leaves the last computer open to allegations of being the computer user that made the request. This is referred to a “Onion Routing” because of the layers of computers involved.

 

This was made clear to William Weber, as user of the service, when federal agents showed up at his home on November 28, 2012 and accused him of distributing child pornography.   The 20 year old from Graz, Austria denies the allegations.   Mr. Weber was a volunteer with TOR, a Walpole, Mass., non-profit that is attempting to take web surfing anonymously mainstream.  Created in part to protect dissidents in countries that crack down on on-line discussions and group work such as China and Iran, TOR gets a large part of its annual budget (roughly 80%) from the U.S. Government , re rest is made up by countries like Sweden that promote a free internet.

 

When asked to comment, John Shehan, executive director of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, based in Alexandria, VA said “Tor is "a challenge for law enforcement."  It is being used regularly to trade sexually exploitative images of children, he says, but there is little Tor's creators can do about it.  The FBI won’t comment on TOR.

 

Tor's executive director, Andrew Lewman says the organization has received subpoenas, but hasn't ended up in court because it doesn't actually store any data that could be of use. "We spend a lot of time talking to various law enforcement agencies," he says, adding that some police use Tor themselves for undercover work.

 

While we believe Tor volunteers are likely protected by U.S. law, it hasn't been tested in court. Under current federal law, Internet service and telephone providers aren't held accountable for how criminals use their networks.  Still, we recommend Tor volunteers with the largest exit nodes set up their servers at third-party server facilities rather than their homes or offices, if only to prevent authorities from temporarily seizing computers that they are using for other purposes.

 

For more info, see:

 

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324677204578185382377144280.html?KEYWORDS=tor+project

 

And

 

https://www.torproject.org/

 

Can you get in trouble with "fake" Child Porn? Ask the lawyer and expert witness that owes $300k for doing it in court!

A federal appeals court has approved a $300,000 award against an Ohio lawyer rejecting the attorney's arguments that he had a First Amendment right to morph stock photos into child pornography as part of a defense trial exhibit and that no one was harmed by his doing so.
Dean Boland was trying to show that overbroad laws against child pornography could entrap a defendant who didn't know whether the images were real or fake. But he wound up in trouble himself under a federal law that prohibits possession of images "created, adapted or modified" to depict identifiable minors in explicit sexual conduct, Reuters reports.

In the exhibit, Boland showed the jury "before" and "after" photos, including a stock image of a child eating a doughnut that he replaced with a penis. The exhibits would have been legal, under federal law, if they were entirely computer-generated or manipulated photos of adults, the Cincinnati-based 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals explained in its Friday opinion (PDF).

To avoid being federally prosecuted, Boland OK'd a diversion agreement in which he admitted creating and possessing child pornography and apologized in the Cleveland Bar Journal. However, he contested the damages sought in a 2007 civil lawsuit by the parents of two child in the stock photos he used, arguing that they hadn't been hurt by images that were shown only in court and never electronically circulated.

The appellate panel disagreed. Upholding the award of $300,000 in damages under federal child pornography law that provides for such compensation and comparing the damage done by such images to the damage done by defamation, it said that injury to reputation and emotional well-being results.

"When he created morphed images, he intended to help criminal defendants, not harm innocent children," wrote Judge Jeffrey Sutton of Boland. "Yet his actions did harm children, and Congress has shown that it means business in addressing this problem by creating sizable damages awards for victims of this conduct."

Boland did not respond to requests for comment from the news agency.