Over the past few days, the German police have Tor servers confiscated taken. The servers, which are used to anonymize internet access, were in most cases on the shelves of seven German hosting providers. Although there is still a lot of uncertainty about the scope of the action, ‘several dozen’ servers have been taken off the air, apparently with the aim of extracting information about the distribution of child pornography. Tor, which stands for ‘The Onion Router’, is a network of virtual tunnels where a connected computer only knows the computers it communicates with directly. Only the so-called ‘exit nodes’, which provide communication between the Tor network and the rest of the internet, could have any useful information, but if it is correct secured the German Hermandad can still do nothing with it.
According to a comment on supersized.org the action is therefore not at all intended to yield concrete results: the German government is trying to put the Tor servers in a bad light through the association with child pornography, so that the use of the network decreases and it becomes easier for terrorist fighters. Another article cites a statement by the Schleswig-Holstein Minister of Justice who said a few weeks ago that “Data security initiatives are now an open invitation to criminals such as pedophiles and terrorists.” According to the author, the seizure is always beneficial to the German government: if traces of child pornography are found, the Justice Department has a reason to ban Tor servers, and if that is not the case, it would have been shown that the p2p service is too dangerous is to allow unchecked. A traffic data hold, which would effectively make the Tor system obsolete, should then be the next step.