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Comment by fsniper | Hacker News Reader

Please there is absolutely no difference between supplying unquestioned hosting or supplying unquestioned passage for unquestioned data.

Let's put in daily means, either if you are a landlord or an hotel owner you are not obliged to question your guests criminal activities nor if you are a road provider you are obliged to question your passengers intends. This is exactly the job of the law enforcement.

If you are served for denying access to some criminal and you do not comply matters change.

In this case you are expected to take measures even if it is not your business to judge someone and you are held responsible.

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Assuming it's true, this quote from the article:

A Freedom Hosting account cost a one time fee of $5 or was free with an invite from an existing member. It offered unlimited space and bandwidth, an onion domain (“xxx.onion”), “Fast Network with 24/7 Uptime,” PHP and MySQL support with unlimited MYSQL databases [...]

A one-off payment of $5 per site? I can't see how the hosting company could make any sort of profit whatsoever, and probably not even break-even (although it does depend on how many sites per server, and how much bandwidth the Tor links can actually take)

If an established hosting provider decided that they also wanted to offer hidden-service hosting, and it was misused without their ability/requirement to police it, I think it'd be a different matter (although gathering evidence that a particular .onion site was hosted with them would be problematic, certainly).

One of the problems here is that as purely hidden services provider (and presumably, some relatively anonymous form of payment, cash-in-the-mail or whatever), there's no practical way for legal authorities to contact them about investigations, or even determine who has jurisdiction.

Financials of the business is of course questionable and seemingly unprofitable. I have no obligation in this context but running unprofitable business is not a crime. If it was most of the current startups are screwed :)

In current situation, without concrete or even any evidence hosting provider is held responsible as facilitator for child pornography. AFAIK this "business model" for encrypted and stealth mode hosting is not unlawful so law enforcement is trying to facilitate unavailable law with holding the "suspect" with related but not actualized crime.

FH was set up to be a safe haven for CP and other illegal/semi-illegal content. Anonymously on TOR. Good luck serving them a notice about hosting that content. It was never meant to be anything else. Let's not kid ourselves, it was not a white hat business.

Comparing it to a normal service like a road provider or a hotel is just laughable. They have legit business. FH was primarily used for unsavory business. That totally changes the equation. The intent behind the service is pretty damn important.

So if you are a hotel owner which happens to be used for illegal operations, say pimping, money laundering or drug dealing you are "a facilitator" for these crimes?

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