This is a Tor Exit Relay

Who uses Tor?

Tor is used by many important segments of the population: whistleblowers, journalists, dissidents skirting the Great Firewall and oppressive censorship, abuse victims, stalker targets, the US military, and law enforcement, among many others.

While Tor is not designed for malicious users, they can in principle use the network for malicious ends. In reality the actual amount of abuse is quite low: criminals have significantly better access to privacy and anonymity than the ordinary users they prey upon, and can and do build far more capable hidden networks than Tor. The social need for accessible, censorship-resistant private communication outweighs the risk posed by bad actors, who are almost always uncovered by traditional police work rather than by monitoring of network infrastructure.

Legal actions against a Tor user

No single Tor node can determine both the origin and destination of a given transmission. It is therefore extremely difficult to track a Tor user, even for a valid reason.

The best way to understand Tor in legal terms is as a network of routers operating as common carriers, much like the Internet backbone - except that Tor routers do not contain identifiable routing information about the source of a packet.

There is little the operator of this router can do to help trace a connection. This router keeps no logs of any Tor traffic, so there is nothing to trace legitimate or illegitimate traffic with, and attempts to seize this router will accomplish nothing. For legal information, see:

• Tor overview
• Tor abuse FAQ
• EFF Tor legal FAQ

What can I do about abuse?

If you have a complaint about this router, email the maintainer. If complaints concern a particular service being abused, the operator will consider blocking that service in the exit policy, which prevents this router from allowing that traffic to exit. Common P2P ports are already blocked.

You can also block this IP - or all Tor exits - for your own service. The Tor Project provides a list of all exit node IP addresses and an official DNSRBL for automated checks. Please use these options considerately: it would be unfortunate to deny all Tor users access to your site indefinitely because of a few bad apples.