Russian police have arrested a Tor node operator Dmitry Bogatov. They have charged him with a terrorism offence and the reason for all this, as they have claimed is the connection between his IP address and many posts allegedly inciting disorder and dissent.
A mathematics lecturer at Moscow’s Finance and Law University named Bogatov is arrested on April 6, and many privacy activists are calling this as a “gross misunderstanding.”
Russian authorities claim that Bogatov responsible for at least two posts left on the sysadmins.ru, in one of them, he has encouraged the protestors and called them for a riot with “bottles, rags, gas, styrofoam, turpentine, and acetone.” That post was left under the alias “Airat Bashirov,” and that protest in question was an illegal anti-corruption rally.
In the another post left by him, “Airat Bashirov,” a video by the Kanye West was involved. The video which is called “No Church In The Wild” was used to invoke the “insubordination to legal demands of police, and also mass disorder,” as claimed by the investigators and police.
After they linked all these posts to the Bogatov’s property, the police have arrested him for the “public calls for terrorist activity.” On the other hand, Bogatov uses this server to maintain one of the Tor network’s exit nodes, which means anyone in the world could have used it and, for a time, take on its address.
For those of you who don’t know, Tor network is created in a way that sends user’s data around the world through multiple relays. This is done in order to protect the user’s privacy by sending it through enough relays to make any connection of the original user to the data impossible.
