Dear SWINOGers!

at the recent SWINOG-specialevent, I talked with a few of you about running tor-exit-nodes. For those not having talked to me or been there, I was asking on behalf of the Swiss Privacy Foundation [1], of which I'm part. We are an approved non-profit organisation in various cantons of Switzerland and operate services that help improve privacy and support the right of freedom to speech, besides providing workshops on related topics. (that was not intended to be some marketing-bubble ;-)

At the event, I promised to post on the list a bit more in detail what we plan to do, so that those interested can contact me again - and maybe others can jump up if they like to.

We are currently operating two tor-exit-nodes (refer to [2] for informations about tor), together with our german friends from the german privacy foundation [3], these exit nodes are running in germany. For various reasons, we want to start running tor exit nodes in Switzerland by next year and thus are looking for interested parties here, who would be willing to support us.

That's basically the story.

In technical terms, this means, that we're looking for - either rackspace and connectivity - or possibly some virtually hosted variant (however running an exit-node is quite cpu-intensive and thus probably not really what one wants to do on a shared server). We think that 2-5 rackunits would suffice for our needs in the comming 2-5 years. Of course, this is also quite bandwidth-consuming, however we're capable of limiting that down to almost any number (where too small numbers of course don't make too much sense) - one just needs to be aware, that it's a "full-on" service, generating traffic around the clock. We have some limited budget available as well, which basically consists of the fees and donations to our association.

Particularly, as far as possible, we're looking for ISPs with own interests in such technologies, as - like with lots of other things - running tor-services also has a darker side. Of course, the anonymity won't only be used by fine people for doing good things. We are fully aware of that, we believe that supporting the higher goals like anonymity and freedom of speech by far outweighs the abuse of such technologies. It is almost certain, however, that such a server will cause some troubles during it's existence. These troubles can probably range from abuse complaints up to seizure of the server by authorities. For countering that, we do everything we do as transparent as possible. We are willing and want to take over the full abuse-handling for the IPs in question, the machines are specially prepared to show according informations on different ports, appropriate DNS- and WHOIS-entries should be made.

I think that's all that needs to be said for now, please apologise if it got a bit lengthy. If you are interested and willing to participate on the subject, please drop me a mail, so we can fix further details and talk about.

Thanks a lot and keep up the good work all of you do daily!

Pascal

[1] http://www.privacyfoundation.ch [2] http://www.torproject.org [3] http://www.privacyfoundation.de