Library's Use of Tor, Spurring Law Enforcement Concerns, Defended by Advocates

Tor is a good thing, designed to help people communicate with impunity, said Center for Democracy & Technology Chief Technologist Joseph Lorenzo Hall. Likening Tor to a hammer, he said it can be used to build things and make lives better or it can be used to destroy something. That doesn’t mean Tor and other anonymity technology should be eliminated, Hall said. “People who do deal in child porn are typically much more sophisticated than a lot of people give them credit for in terms of keeping their stuff secure and it's because they're doing really bad things," he said. "There's a whole bunch of things that can happen on [hidden servers] but that's because here's a cloak of anonymity. That doesn't mean that we should at all get rid of anonymity whatsoever. ... Anonymity itself is important."

Because Tor affords users a way to share information over public networks without compromising privacy, it can attract criminals, said a Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman. She said that federal enforcement agencies have ways to track down bad actors on networks that provide anonymity. Because the network was originally designed, implemented and deployed by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, DHS is supportive of the good uses of Tor, the spokeswoman said.

Tor gained public notoriety recently as a public library in New Hampshire activated a middle relay node for the Tor network as part of the Library Freedom Project’s Tor exit node pilot program. After the node was turned on, authorities warned the library of the possible dangers of activating a node on a network that allows for complete anonymity, said Lebanon Public Libraries Director Sean Fleming.

A Homeland Security Investigations special agent forwarded a story about the relay node to a law enforcement agent at the New Hampshire Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) task force as an FYI, the DHS spokeswoman said. The agent didn't ask for any action to be taken and has had no contact with the Lebanon Police Department, or with the library, she said. From there, the ICAC task force forwarded the information to the local authorities in Lebanon, said an ICAC spokesman.

The library officials turned the node off to evaluate the issues that were brought to their attention, Fleming said. During that time, the library received about 90 written comments from community members, of which only two were negative, Fleming said. So the library’s board elected to turn the node back on, despite concerns law enforcement had about possible illegal activity. The library is protected from responsibility for illegal activity that shows up on its IP address because of the Tor Project, Fleming said. "We're not responsible for that traffic anymore [in the same way] that we wouldn't be responsible for somebody using their laptop in the corner of the library to download copies of movies," he said. "That's one of the reasons the Library Freedom Project wants to work with public libraries because we have layers of protection."

Tor is free and open source software that offers three layers of encryption to users -- bouncing the user through three different nodes across the world, so that a user’s IP address can’t be tracked to his or her actual location, said Nima Fatemi, a Tor Project volunteer who is working with the Library Freedom Project’s Tor exit node pilot program. The library has only a non-exit relay, so it will not show up as a user’s IP address. Once the exit relay is set up, then a user -- anywhere in the world -- could show up as being at the library, Fatemi said. The concerns that law enforcement has surrounding illegal activity would really only be an issue on Tor's hidden servers, which accounts for only about 3.4 percent of the network, he said.

Even though there are possible negative uses for Tor, Noah Swartz, Electronic Frontier Foundation staff technologist, said people should worry more about privacy on the open Web. The value that Tor provides is more important than the “fictitious” concerns that government entities warn of, he said. Users of the network aren’t generally using Tor for illegal activity nor are they using it solely to hide from NSA surveillance, Swartz said. When people complain about Tor, Swartz said, it is because they want to criminalize certain online activities, such as downloading music or movies illegally. He said getting rid of Tor won't fix any problems. “The fight against anonymity in the name of preventing harassment or bad actions is pretty ludicrous,” he said. “It's used as a strong arm argument to prop up surveillance.”

Librarians have always been activists, so it seemed only natural that they would be involved in protecting citizens’ freedom to search anonymously on the Internet, said Library Freedom Project Director Alison Macrina. She began working on this Tor program about two years ago in the wake of the WikiLeaks and former NSA contractor Edward Snowden's revelations because she said libraries are uniquely positioned to educate communities and the Library Freedom Project has been teaching librarians about privacy for years. Kilton Public Library is part of an ongoing pilot program, but with all of the attention the relay node has received, a number of other libraries are asking to be a part of the next phase, Macrina said. “It was really cool to see democracy in action; we had this challenge, we got community members to come out in favor of it -- it was just a really beautiful thing,” she said. “After we had this big success, then we really started getting other libraries who were invigorated by this as this big amazing effort that we can take as a librarian community.”