14 DAY TRIAL // On March 30, at 6:15 AM, officers of the Seattle Police Department (SPD) raided the house of Jan Bultmann and David Robinson, two privacy activists and the co-founders of the Seattle Privacy Coalition (SPF).
PSD officers evacuated the married couple out of their condo in Queen Anne Hill, a neighborhood in the center of Seattle, and executed a search warrant, looking for digital evidence of child pornography on their computers.
The two activists were not the main suspects, police officers being more focused on their computers on which they were also running a TOR server.
Tor has an image problem
While Tor may be an agent of good for political dissidents and whistleblowers, recent statistics revealed by CloudFlare show that over 94 percent of Tor's traffic is automated and labeled as "per se malicious."
Despite the fact that most law enforcement are well aware of the drug trafficking and other illegal activities going on via Tor, they're mostly helpless in fighting it, mainly due to Tor's onion-like multi-layered architecture which makes it almost impossible to track down users.
Probably because of this bad image of child pornography, drug trafficking, hacking forums, and arms dealing marketplaces, in a recent Ipsos survey, 71 percent of respondents said they won't have anything against shutting down the Dark Web, most of which is found on the Tor network.
As expected, police never discovered anything at the activists' house and left without making any arrests or seizing any equipment.
The couple felt targeted, violated
In statements to the local press, the couple said they felt violated by the SPD's actions, mainly because officers executing the warrant knew exactly what Tor was and how it worked, and should have known better that they wouldn't have found anything on their server.
This is not the first time when these two outspoken activists have been targeted, being among the first social media users to receive notifications about state-sponsored attacks on their Twitter account.
After police left, the Tor server was shut down and the couple plans to have it analyzed it to see if officers installed any spyware on their equipment. Because the same server was also used for their privacy advocacy group's email and website, both are still down at the time of writing.
The couple's fear of hidden spyware is justified. Last summer, it was revealed that the FBI used spyware installed on a seized Tor server to catch visitors of a child pornography Dark Web website.
Additionally, after the Tor Project installed a Tor exit node in a public library last summer in New Hampshire, pressure from local law enforcement forced the library to shut down its server.