A recent report from The Mainichi claims Japan’s National Police Agency (roughly equivalent to the FBI in the United States) urges ISPs to block internet connections for users found abusing Tor (The Onion Router) clients. Tor’s purpose is to create secure, anonymous connections to internet sites by splitting up the data stream and routing it through multiple servers and paths. In fact, U.S. law enforcement regularly uses Tor when investigating websites to avoid leaving a trail of government-owned IP addresses in the log files. Perhaps more famously, Tor clients regularly help citizens escape government oppression in pro-democracy movements.
Unfortunately, the Japanese NPA was embarrassed late last year when a hacker by the name of “Demon Killer” seized control of a number of computer systems and posted death threats on public message forums. The police believed they located a group of four individuals involved in the incidents and extracted confessions from them, only to discover the hacker continued posting the threats while the suspects were in custody. When the real hacker was finally arrested, the police learned he used the Tor client on his computer to avoid detection.
A panel was formed to determine how to tackle the issue, with a resulting report published on April 18, 2013 that recommends blocking access of Tor users at the ISP’s discretion as an effective solution.
The very nature of Tor means an ISP won’t have the ability to know what a user is doing with it, making it unclear what constitutes abuse. This leads some people to fear that a blanket Tor ban is what the NPA is really after.
Such a policy would clearly upset industry groups, as well as make the NPA look technologically backwards and incompetent, which is exactly what the organization is trying to avoid.
Oh, I like that! How do I access TOR?