TOR admin arrested by German police

Germany recently passed some harsh computer security laws, and in the best tradition of governments the world over, the wording is so vague as to be utterly useless for catching real criminals, whilst putting normal users at risk.

The German police have since been busy raiding data centres to take down TOR nodes. Developed by people at the EFF, TOR (The Onion Router) is a way of tunneling your traffic to help improve your anonymity when using the Internet.

As revealed in his blog, German TOR server operator Alex Jansen was arresting by German police, over a bomb hoax posted on a forum by someone using TOR.

The police intimidated Alex and his wife, confiscated his personal possessions - and yet didn't shut down the offending TOR server.

Sadly the end result is that Alex has a pile of legal bills to foot now, and he's shutdown his TOR server. Clearly it seems laws aren't even needed - clueless police intimidating and arresting the innocent can cause enough pain and hassle.

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