Re: Some legal trouble with TOR in France

[Mike Perry <mikepery@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Thus spake Olivier Barbut (olivier.barbut@xxxxxxx):

> Hello dear tor talkers,
> 
> I'm running the tor router "mini", located in paris, france, and I 
> believe I have to share with you what happened to me last wednesday,the 
> 10th of May. My router was an outside gateway, doing request for tor 
> anonymous users.
> 
> Last wednesday morning, at 7:45, three cops did knock at my door. They 
> suspected me to have downloaded some child porn videos. As I was waking 
> up, I understood it was tor-related. I did explain them I was a TOR 
> outside gateway, but they didn't knew about it. They searched everywhere 
> in my small home and took every support they could find: hard drives 
> they removed from computers, cds, disks, and then they took me to the 
> police station, at the child protection service, jailing me the whole 
> day while they was searching my hard drives and cds for traces of the 
> video they was looking for.

Do french police need a warrant or some form of approval to conduct
this sort of search? In the US they should require a warrant, and some
judge would have to approve that. A US judge exercising proper
dilligence should be able to realize that the search was not likely to
produce relevant evidence to the case in question, or so one would
hope.

-- 
Mike Perry
Mad Computer Scientist
fscked.org evil labs