On Mon, Jul 29, 2013 at 12:35 PM, Andy Isaacson adi@hexapodia.org wrote:
Yes, there are cases of law enforcement seizing all computer gear from a house with a exit node -- not just the exit node computer. Most recently in Austria in a child porn investigation.
[...]
We did some operational planning for this risk, in conjunction with the university legal and IT departments, when we set up the CMU Tor exit.
The machine is in a cube farm filled with other equipment that people need for their work; this is because we want to have immediate physical access to it in an emergency, and anywhere else we could put it would interfere with that. However, it has its own dedicated IP address, it runs absolutely no other services, it is clearly labeled both in DNS and on the physical box, and there's nothing else on the table it sits on. The hope is that this will be sufficient to persuade law enforcement to seize *only* that machine, if it comes to it.
Of course, it helps as much or more to have the equipment under the aegis of an organization with lawyers already briefed and on tap, and that has trained all the staff to call legal *before doing anything else* when the police show up.
Also, the greater operational threat is having the plug pulled by one's connectivity provider. I personally would not risk having an exit node in my house for that reason alone.
zw