Ansel Herz writes:
One week after Seattle police searched the home of two well-known privacy activists for child porn and found nothing, critics are questioning why the department failed to include a key piece of information in its application for a warrant—the fact that the activists operated a Tor node out of their apartment, in order to help internet users all over the world surf the web anonymously.
“You knew about the Tor node,” said Eric Rachner, a cybersecurity counsultant and co-founder of Seattle’s Center for Open Policing, addressing the police department on Twitter, “but didn’t mention it in warrant application. Y’all pulled a fast one on the judge… you knew the uploader could have been literally anyone in the world.”
[…]In the aftermath of the search, the question was whether Seattle police had done their technical due diligence: Did they recognize that Bultmann and David were operating a Tor node? If so, did they realize that a tip about child porn coming from that IP address, absent any other evidence, likely meant someone else in another part of the world had uploaded the material and it had been randomly routed through their node?
Read more on The Stranger.