We've discussed the PROTECT-IP Act at length here at ZeroPaid. While we have plenty of ways of examining the PROTECT-IP Act, we've decided to talk to Andrew Lewman, the Executive Director of Tor Project, about Tor, and the PROTECT-IP Act.

We've been running a series of guides discussing various ways of defeating censorship - particularly US DNS censorship. Previously, our guides covered methods to defeat censorship including command prompt, using a DNS web tool, using a hosts file and, for those sites that merely had their domains seized, using the MAFIAAFire redirector. One question one might ask is, "What if the ISP merely censors the server IP address of a censored website?". Well, there's various ways of circumventing such methods as well - one way is to use a well-known application called Tor.

Should using the internet Anonymously be a thing of the past? That's what police in Denmark are hoping. They are currently recommending that identities be verified before someone is able to log on to the internet. But is it one thing to hope that internet anonymity be abolished and quite another to make it happen?

How people should make themselves known to the as yet open, anonymous connections are still unclear. Working with the Ministry of Justice mentions various possibilities such as Social Security numbers, electronic signature or SMS solutions. The requirement will, however, according to Politiken be that a network user "will not have access to the Internet before the information about the person's identity is registered and verified."

We are simply part of a very wide net that they cast trying to track someone doing something illegal. It’s not much different from what would have happened if the police were investigating someone who had made obscene phone calls where the police would have seized the logs of the phone company.

The police won’t find any useful information in the servers, since none of the volunteer operators enable logging on the Tor servers, according to Nerad.

“In fact, that scenario of them checking for logs is worst case,” Nerad said. “Likely, they just seized every machine with an IP which had touched someone doing something nefarious. They probably have no
idea that these were even Tor servers.”

TOR is an “onion routing” system, where a directory server points your traffic to a middleman node that can pass it on to other middlemen or to an exit node. The exit node finally connects to the site you’re trying to reach, and the data is sent back through the system of middleman tunnels. Every step of the way is encrypted, except for the final exit node to the content server connection. Some sources say that several German middleman TOR servers have been confiscated over the past few days, leading up to the recent exit-node seizures. If that’s the case, it makes the raid seem like an attempt to take out TOR infrastructure.

That’s not easy to do, however. At the moment, only 20 of 787 TOR exit nodes appear to be offline or hibernating, with 5 of the unreachable nodes inside German IP address space. If the government had hopes of shutting down at least the German part of the anonymizing network, there’s still some work to do: 180 German exit nodes remain in operation.

It’s more likely that the police are after log files from the TOR servers, and may have simply gone for exit nodes after the middleman servers proved unfruitful to the cause. However, TOR’s default settings don’t leave any logs usable for tracking down any individual user’s actual site usage—two separate settings have to be changed in order to generate logs with that level of detail.

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