Here's What Happened When The Dutch Secret Service Tried To Recruit A Tor Admin

from the true-or-false? dept

Law enforcement keeps bumping into Tor, as Techdirt has reported many times over the years. So it's understandable that the authorities are always looking for ways to subvert and circumvent the extra protection that Tor can offer its users when used properly. For obvious reasons, we don't often get to hear exactly how they are doing that, but a fascinating post on the Dutch site Buro Jansen & Janssen purports to give some details of what happened when the country's secret service tried to recruit a Tor admin. First, a caveat. The site says:

We received this story from a person who wants to remain anonymous. We conducted an investigation to the existence of this person and confirmed their existence.

However, that still raises the question of whether the site itself is reliable. It describes itself as follows:

A land-rights collective which has been publishing for 30 years on the expansion of repressive legislation, public-private partnerships, authorities, governmental actions and other state affairs.

Some might argue that means it has an axe to grind against the authorities and secret services, making its report less credible. That said, the site seems to contain a wide variety of solid information, and the post itself is plausible enough. It recounts how the Dutch secret service in the form of an older man and younger woman contacted the unnamed Tor admin:

They approached me and identified themselves with a badge of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and said they were working for the AIVD (Dutch secret service). They asked me to hear them out. I was in a state of shock and thought I had committed a crime but they immediately started to talk about on my studies. They made it clear they've read my thesis on IT security and showered me with compliments before they were firing a round of job offers at me.

Here's what they offered and what they wanted:

They asked me if I was interested in traveling for a couple of years and for example work in Germany at a technology company while visiting the Chaos Computer Club's hacker spaces to see what's going on and report back to them. All my expenditures would be covered. ... They also mentioned that occasionally there are hacker parties in Italy, Austria, Spain, and other countries, and they said I could see that as paid holidays. They were very honest about the fact that they were looking for foreign talent but mostly interested in keeping tabs on Dutch IT-professionals and hackers abroad. They emphasized on monitoring Dutch people abroad at least 3 times.

That's pretty conventional stuff. But you obviously don't try to recruit a Tor admin unless you are also interested in keeping an eye on Tor itself:

The old man who showered me with compliments suddenly said: "look, we know about your Tor-exit nodes, if you run them with us you will be able to make a living out of it, but if you don't and something illegal happens, we can't help you if the police visits your home and seizes your equipment."

That threat was accompanied with a further warning not to speak to anybody about the conversation that had just taken place. Let's hope that nothing has happened, or will happen, to the person involved for disobeying that instruction. Assuming, of course, that the post is genuine -- something that Techdirt readers will doubtless have their own views about.

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Filed Under: aivd, law enforcement, netherlands, recruitment, tor admin