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THIS IS A TOR EXIT ROUTER



You are most likely accessing this website because you've 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.

Tor works by running user traffic through a random chain of encrypted servers,
and then letting the traffic exit the Tor network through an exit node like this
one. This design makes it very hard for a service to know which user is
connecting to it, since it can only see the IP-address of the Tor exit node:

Illustration showing how a user might connect to a service through the Tor
network. The user first sends their data through three daisy-chained encrypted
Tor servers that exist on three different continents. Then the last Tor server
in the chain connects to the target service over the normal internet. The user
This server Your service Tor encrypted link Unencrypted link

Read more about how Tor works.

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.

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.

Furthermore, this machine also serves as a carrier of email, which means that
its contents are further protected under the ECPA. 18 USC 2707 explicitly allows
for civil remedies ($1000/account plus legal fees) in the event of a seizure
executed without good faith or probable cause (it should be clear at this point
that traffic with an originating IP address of tor.fmt.53labs.com should not
constitute probable cause to seize the machine). Similar considerations exist
for 1st amendment content on this machine.

If you are a representative of a company who feels that this router is being
used to violate the DMCA, please be aware that this machine does not host or
contain any illegal content. Also be aware that network infrastructure
maintainers are not liable for the type of content that passes over their
equipment, in accordance with DMCA "safe harbor" provisions. In other words, you
will have just as much luck sending a takedown notice to the Internet backbone
providers. Please consult EFF's prepared response for more information on this
matter.

For more information, please consult the following documentation:

Tor Overview Tor Abuse FAQ Tor Legal FAQ

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 my router from allowing that traffic to exit through it. I can only do
this on an IP+destination port basis, however. Common P2P ports are already
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.