Comment by arktos_
Comment by arktos_ a day ago
Pardon my ignorance, but I thought it fruitful to ask: Are there any issues that can arise by doing this on a VPS?
I ask because I know of stories of law enforcement sending inquiries to owners of, say, exit nodes requiring certain information about given traffic. I don't know if this happens for middle-nodes (or whatever they're called).
Moreover, are there any issues with associating a node to, you know, your name and billing information?
I don't know much about this, and although I could look it up, I think that my questions - and your respective answers or those of others - might do some public service of information sharing here.
I never operated a TOR node, but as far as I know and heard from other sources, TOR realays don't get much attention from law enforcement, it any attention at all. Which makes sense: all they're doing is getting encrypted traffic in and giving encrypted traffic out. It would hard for them to link a relay node to a specific connection, and even if they do, you can't help them in any way: even you as the node operator are only able to see encrypted traffic.
Edit: there's a youtuber called "Mental Outlaw" that published a while ago some videos about setting up and operating TOR nodes. He sometimes gives inaccurate information regarding more theoretical topics, so I don't follow him much. But I think he can be trusted for this practical topics.