Researchers Face Jail Risk For Snooping Study

An article appeared in Slashdot about a group of researchers from the University of Colorado and the University of Washington who may face both civil and criminal penalties for a research project in which they snooped on users of the Tor anonymous proxy network.

The team of two graduate students and three faculty failed to seek legal review of the project nor did they run it past the Human Subjects Committee at their universities.

Should federal prosecutors pursue this, they could face up to 5 years in jail for violating the Wiretap Act. This is the same law that groups like the ACLU and EFF sued AT&T for violating when they shared customer communications with the US National Security Agency.. AT&T succeeded in obtaining retroactive immunity from Congress, but only after spending tens of millions of dollars on lobbyists.

Regarding the legal issues at play here, Kevin Bankston, the EFF lawyer who wrote the Legal guide for Tor server operators and who also lead the EFF's lawsuit against AT&T said

"I agree that their logging the content exiting their nodes would appear to constitute interceptions of those electronic (not wire) communications under the Wiretap Act, and I don't think they qualify for the narrow provider exceptions [18 USC 2511, 2 (a) I], so I still see the same potential civil and criminal liability that was noted in our FAQ."

See full story at cnetNEWS.com.