Tor relay operators are, as a rule, entirely willing to give law enforcement all the information they have about connections that have gone through their relays. They simply don't have any. And there's no legal requirement for them to have any.
... or at least there never was in the past. The new wave of stupid and extremely broad "duty of care" laws that try to apply to the design of any and every communication service may change that. But it hasn't been litigated anywhere.
Whether or not the exit node operators retained logs is besides the point. These exit nodes are facilitating illegal activities, and it's trivial to prove. How do they not get arrested?
It sounds like Germany extends some sort of carrier protection to Tor exit node operators. E.g. if someone organizes a drug deal over the phone, Verizon is not liable. But Verizon does have to meet some minimum standards of records keeping and law enforcement assistance (wire tapping).
Lots of people and organizations facilitate crime. That’s not generally the legal standard. They typically must be proved to done so intentionally (or with reckless disregard)
No, it is. There are more often specific laws that exempt platformers of liabilities on condition that they keep logs and cooperate with LE.
Perhaps the most famous example is DMCA: [Google] is exempt from liabilities for hosting pirated movies on [YouTube] by US laws, on condition that it's not actively involved with it and fully robotic with takedowns.
If a criminal rode on a bus to place of the crime, is the bus driver automatically liable? Bus company? Is his phone company liable because he talked about his crimes on the phone?
IANAL, but "legally"? Bus companies has code of conduct posted on the wall at their depot for its users to read and agree, or state law regulating public transportation, and it always says using it for crimes is against the law. Those clauses let drivers and companies frame themselves as victims to escape prosecutions, unless there's going to be gross negligence or sorts that override them.
It's not like courts treat popular businesses like buses and ISPs as sceneries just by gut feeling. There are always laws.
If a government investigator joins a WhatsApp channel where loads of people are sharing CSE, WhatsApp will help the government find the people responsible. WhatsApp encrypts the content of the data, but they retain message logs and do cooperate with law enforcement. Presumably the same for iMessage.
This largely conforms with how the first telecoms received immunity for abuse of their services. They retain logs and assist the government with investigations, and in exchange they are shielded from liability. WhatsApp and iMessage would probably cooperate to the same extent, minus wire-tapping messages in transit (because they can't). That's vastly greater cooperation than a tor exit node operator that retains no logs.s
The original post mentioned facilitation, which from what i understand is when you assist comitting a crime but have no secific knowledge of the crime.
I imagine for tor, the reason is that there are also good uses for tor. However i dont think "i intentionally know nothing" works as a defence in general.
I was answering something about assistance to law enforcement, which isn't the same issue as facilitation of crime.
"Facilitation" as an offense in itself is one of those things that tends to be a real thing, but varies a lot depending on the jurisdiction. In most places, most of the time, you're only going to get in trouble for facilitating crime if your service is especially set up to be unusually useful for crime. You're especially vulnerable if you specifically designed it for crime. If those things apply, then knowing it's being used for crime (but not necessarily on which specific occasions) can make it worse for you. Give or take, depending on where you live.
In the past, Tor nodes, even exit nodes, have mostly gotten a pass, at least in countries where most of them are located. They get raided all the time, but largely as cases of mistaken identity. That's probably because most Tor traffic has historically probably been people trying to hide from ad tracking or people worried about their perfectly legal activities being spied on. So it's hard to say the service is really aimed at illegal activity.
Things are tightening up worldwide, in statute and probably in case law, mostly because of Tor and other services possibly being swept in by standards primarily aimed at social media. We may start seeing Tor nodes targeted because Tor is now considered "too adapted to legal activity", or even because node operators are "not doing enough to prevent" illegal activity (including redesigning the system if necessary).
But until fairly recently that's been more what you'd expect to see in North Korea than what you'd expect to see in Germany (or the US).
I described exactly that in my second paragraph.