I am not sympathetic to the child porn argument. I do not believe that
possession of child porn should be considered a felony.
I understand heaping heavy punishments on people who create or profit from
child porn, or any other despicable exploitation of minors, however it
should never be illegal to have some magic sequence of bits stored on your
hard drive or passing through your network card. The way we criminalize and
deal with possession of child porn in the USA is dangerous to our personal
liberties, our constitutional rights, and may even be counter-productive
with regard to actually protecting children from abuse.
I'm not saying it's illegal, or should be illegal to run an exit node, I
think tor is a cool idea. The problem lies with the fact that someone
can, and most likely will do something stupid with your exit node.
I'm sure eventually the police will return your stuff, it's just a
matter of them going through all of it with a fine toothed comb looking for
the crap that was spewing from your external ip address.
Not to mention anything they find can and will be used against you in a
court of law, whether its "hacking paraphernalia" or not, if you have
anything on there regardless, once they take it, they can pin anything they
want on you, with or without reason. As much as I love my country I truly
HATE with a capital FUCKING hate, the police state mentality that we have
become in the USA. From the formation of Homeland Security to the Patriot
Act, to the secret FISA courts, drone hits on Americans being assassinated
without trial or due process, we live in a time and place that is sad for
our children to grow up in, and if things don't change, it will not only
get worst, our children will become conditioned to it to the point that
they think this is normal behavior. FISA and its original intentions, are
now domestic spying at its finest, because we the people, are now the
enemies of the state.