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This is a Tor Exit Router

This IP belongs to that of a Tor Exit Router

Most likely you are accessing this website because you had some issue with the traffic coming from this IP. This router is part of the Tor Anonymity Network, which is dedicated to providing privacy to people who need it most: average computer users. This router IP should be generating no other traffic, unless it has been compromised.

Who uses Tor?

Tor sees use by many important segments of the population, including whistle blowers, journalists, Chinese dissidents skirting the Great Firewall and oppressive censorship, abuse victims, stalker targets, the US military, and law enforcement, just to name a few.

While Tor is not designed for malicious computer users, it is true that they can use the network for malicious ends. In reality however, the actual amount of abuse is quite low. This is largely because criminals and hackers have significantly better access to privacy and anonymity than do the regular users whom they prey upon. Criminals can and do build, sell, and trade far larger and more powerful networks than Tor on a daily basis. Thus, in the mind of this operator, the social need for easily accessible censorship-resistant private, anonymous communication trumps the risk of unskilled bad actors, who are almost always more easily uncovered by traditional police work than by extensive monitoring and surveillance anyway.

Legal actions against a Tor user

No single Tor node can determine both the origin and destination of a given transmission. In other words, it's incredebly difficult to track a Tor user, even if for a valid reason.

In terms of applicable law, the best way to understand Tor is to consider it a network of routers operating as common carriers, much like the Internet backbone. However, unlike the Internet backbone routers, Tor routers explicitly do not contain identifiable routing information about the source of a packet, and no single Tor node can determine both the origin and destination of a given transmission.

As such, there is little the operator of this router can do to help you track the connection further. This router maintains no logs of any of the Tor traffic, so there is little that can be done to trace either legitimate or illegitimate traffic (or to filter one from the other). Attempts to seize this router will accomplish nothing.

For legal information, please see the following;

  1. Tor Overview
  2. Tor Abuse FAQ
  3. Tor Legal FAQ

What can I do to prevent abuse?

That being said, if you still have a complaint about the router, you may email the maintainer. If complaints are related to a particular service that is being abused, I will consider removing that service from my exit policy, which would prevent this router from allowing that traffic to exit through it. Common P2P ports are not blocked.

You also have the option of blocking this IP address and others on the Tor network if you so desire. The Tor project provides a web service to fetch a list of all IP addresses of Tor exit nodes that allow exiting to a specified IP:port combination, and an official DNSRBL is also available to determine if a given IP address is actually a Tor exit server. Please be considerate when using these options. It would be unfortunate to deny all Tor users access to your site indefinitely simply because of a few bad apples.

Email the Maintainer: poseidon1.dispense306 AT aleeas DOT com