I have a noob question about privacy and safety in running a node. Suppose - just to make up an example - some journalist creates an unflattering image of Mohammad and uploads it to the network. Predictably, the Ayatollah issues a fatwa saying that the hosts of all the nodes where the image is stored must be beheaded. Suppose also that my lone, humble node ends up with a chunk of the image, and the Iranianian autorities have arrested the journalist and seized his computers. Here’s my question… can they trace my location from that information? Do I get to keep my head?
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You only have an encrypted portion of any file on your computer, not readable by you or anyone else.
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Unlikely. But if they have the image then they can request it from the network and find the nodes that sent it. Such is the nature of UDP and TCP IP addressing that does the physical layer transmissions.
If a crazy person decides to do such a thing, its a difficult thing to avoid in our world. Fortunately that crazy is very rare. Even if that situation you described would happen in real life. They would just be chasing their tail forever since the chunks over time move around the nodes.
As @scottefc86 says the chunks are only a portion of the file and encrypted so even the ABCs could not be charging people with crimes and even the copyright people (who can be as bad in intent as your example) would not be able to bring a case against since its just garbage you hold.
If the baddie is smart to be able to do this IP tracing and get court orders to find you out from the IP address they are way more than enough in smarts to know you had nothing to do with the image or knowingly hosted it. IE they would be more reasonable than a crazy person you basically described.
All in my opinion of course.
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