A dozen libraries across the US have asked for details on how to host Tor exit nodes following a decision by the small town of Lebanon, New Hampshire, to forego police warnings.

Following a decision by the library's board of trustees earlier this week to put the exit node back online, the founder of the Library Freedom Project, Alison Macrina, said that she had heard from a number of other libraries interested in hosting Tor nodes...

...There was consternation at the government's actions, however, and the issue quickly centered on freedom of speech. At its meeting, following the vocal backing of residents, the board unanimously decided to turn it back on.

Macrina now says that the DHS' efforts have put her project on the map. "This has catalyzed additional libraries and community members," she told Motherboard. "Folks have emailed me saying 'We don't care if it gets shut down, we want to push back against [the DHS]'."

A dozen libraries across the US have asked for details on how to host Tor exit nodes following a decision by the small town of Lebanon, New Hampshire, to forego police warnings.

Following a decision by the library's board of trustees earlier this week to put the exit node back online, the founder of the Library Freedom Project, Alison Macrina, said that she had heard from a number of other libraries interested in hosting Tor nodes...

...There was consternation at the government's actions, however, and the issue quickly centered on freedom of speech. At its meeting, following the vocal backing of residents, the board unanimously decided to turn it back on.

Macrina now says that the DHS' efforts have put her project on the map. "This has catalyzed additional libraries and community members," she told Motherboard. "Folks have emailed me saying 'We don't care if it gets shut down, we want to push back against [the DHS]'."

The New Hampshire library, which last week took down a Tor relay after federal authorities read about it on Ars, has finally restored its important link in the anonymizing network.

The node was turned back on Tuesday evening immediately after the board of the Kilton Public Library in Lebanon voted to do so...

...As Ars reported earlier, the goal of the Library Freedom Project is to set up Tor exit relays in as many of these ubiquitous public institutions as possible. As of now, only about 1,000 exit relays exist worldwide. If this plan is successful, it could vastly increase the scope and speed of the famed anonymizing network. For now, Kilton has a middle relay but has plans to convert it to an exit relay. A middle relay passes traffic to another relay before departing the Tor network on the exit relay.

A Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) special agent first learned of the plan after reading Ars’ July 30 article and then forwarded it on as a heads-up to a local police officer on the New Hampshire Internet Crimes Against Children task force. That, in turn, led to a meeting between local law enforcement, city officials, and the library. (HSI is the investigative arm of the Department of Homeland Security.)

A library in a small New Hampshire town started to help Internet users around the world surf anonymously using Tor. Until the Department of Homeland Security raised a red flag.

by Julia Angwin
ProPublica, Sep. 10, 2015, 11:20 a.m.

...In July, the Kilton Public Library in Lebanon, New Hampshire, was the first library in the country to become part of the anonymous Web surfing service Tor. The library allowed Tor users around the world to bounce their Internet traffic through the library, thus masking users’ locations.

Soon after state authorities received an email about it from an agent at the Department of Homeland Security.

“The Department of Homeland Security got in touch with our Police Department,” said Sean Fleming, the library director of the Lebanon Public Libraries.

After a meeting at which local police and city officials discussed how Tor could be exploited by criminals, the library pulled the plug on the project...

A library in a small New Hampshire town started to help Internet users around the world surf anonymously using Tor. Until the Department of Homeland Security raised a red flag.

by Julia Angwin
ProPublica, Sep. 10, 2015, 11:20 a.m.

...In July, the Kilton Public Library in Lebanon, New Hampshire, was the first library in the country to become part of the anonymous Web surfing service Tor. The library allowed Tor users around the world to bounce their Internet traffic through the library, thus masking users’ locations.

Soon after state authorities received an email about it from an agent at the Department of Homeland Security.

“The Department of Homeland Security got in touch with our Police Department,” said Sean Fleming, the library director of the Lebanon Public Libraries.

After a meeting at which local police and city officials discussed how Tor could be exploited by criminals, the library pulled the plug on the project. ...

Late last month, a strange file appeared on an Amazon server belonging to the Heritage Foundation, an influential Washington, D.C.-based think tank that remains widely regarded as one of the country’s most serious and respectable conservative institutions. The file—which appears to have been unintentionally uploaded by a Heritage staffer, rather than obtained by an intruder—offers a remarkable window into how Heritage maintains this reputation. It contains hundreds of emails and thousands of pages of internal fundraising reports documenting how the foundation navigated the flood of conservative conspiracy-mongering that followed Obama’s election in 2008, and how its staffers discussed the increasingly bizarre ideologies of its donor class with puzzlement and occasional derision.

The file, which has since been deleted, is a Microsoft Outlook backup folder that appears to have been associated with an assistant director at Heritage named Steve DeBuhr, who belongs to the foundation’s “major gifts team” and handles donor relations in the Midwest. In that capacity, he received regularly updated “call reports” containing detailed dossiers on current and potential donors as well as DeBuhr’s and other development officers’ various interactions with those donors throughout the country. By all accounts, the file appears to be authentic: It surfaced on the same server (thf_media.s3.amazonaws.com) where Heritage hosts policy papers and membership forms.

Between 2008 and 2009, Heritage raised approximately $135,000,000 in tax-deductible donations from private charities and individuals, according to publicly available tax filings. One of those individuals was a Pennsylvania businessman named Robert W. Ellis, who between 1994 and 2008 gave 40 gifts totaling nearly $250,000 to the foundation. DeBuhr’s records indicate Ellis’s development officer, a Heritage employee named Jeffrey Trimbath, met Ellis in person at least seven times between July 2008 and June 2009. In notes taken after those meetings, Trimbath characterized what he took to be Ellis’s views toward Muslims and liberals.

A Baltimore defense attorney has filed the first of what could be hundreds of challenges to cases in which police allegedly withheld that they had used a high-tech phone tracking device to gather evidence.

The attorney, Joshua Insley, had questioned last fall whether the surveillance equipment known as a stingray was used in the case against his client, Shemar Taylor, who was accused of stealing a cellphone.

Prosecutors and police at the time denied that investigators had used a stingray, but on the witness stand a detective refused to answer questions about what technology they did use. The judge threatened to hold the detective in contempt when he cited a confidentiality agreement with the federal government and refused to answer the judge's questions.

Since then, there have been a number of disclosures about how police use the technology. Insley pointed to the release of a police log of cases in which a stingray was used, which he says proves one was used in Taylor's case.