It looks like the legal system in Texas is going to charge the TOR network for helping criminals. The network has been sued in the state of Texas over aiding a revenge porn website by providing its free service.

Indeed, a criminal justice major at the University of North Texas has launched a lawsuit against the website called Pinkmeth, which allows users to upload and publicly share sexually explicit content without permission from the people in the pictures. Apparently, the website is often used by hackers and ex-partners, and it is deemed illegal in eleven states.

However, the service remains legal in Texas – a state where you can’t own more than 6 dildos or flirt in a public place. The criminal justice major alleges that Pinkmeth obtained illegal access to nude photographs she owned and posted them to the Internet. She believes that TOR was involved in this active civil conspiracy with the service due to the fact that the revenge porn site used its anonymous communications service in order to prevent others from tracking its location. Now the victim wants a million dollars in damages for mental anguish and loss in earning capacity, which resulted from the publication and dissemination of her nude pictures.

Her case stated that a Texas state court has jurisdiction over TOR network, because the latter advertises and offers the services referenced above in the state of Texas and to Texas residents. The network also knowingly assists such services as Pinkmeth in committing torts against residents of Texas. However, to win her case, she needs to prove that Pinkmeth actually communicated with the anonymizing network.

TOR is widely used all over the world, mostly to avoid being tracked and pursued for using file-sharing services. Many industry observers recognized it as the most reliable way to anonymize the online presence, but the recent seizure of the black marketplace Silk Road, which also used TOR in its operation, revealed that the authorities somehow managed to trace the service. In the meantime, legal experts admit that the court might dismiss TOR as a defendant in the case, because its conduct could be protected by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, stating that no provider or user of an interactive service shall be treated as the publisher of data provided by another content provider.