Why would people do that when they could just use Tor Browser?

Become an ISP and you have a pretty good excuse, as well.

Regardless of all that, this isn't about an alibi. It's about the fact that he police had no reason to suspect the targets of their search, but they left out information the judge should have received, got a warrant, and searched anyway.

Just because you posted a comment on Slashdot doesn't automatically mean you weren't up to no good.

Just because it was a Wave G (ISP) circuit doesn't mean the people at the Wave G office weren't up to no good.

It sounds like you are looking at this backward. Traffic exiting the Tor network to the open Internet is not indication that the operator of the Tor node generated that traffic. Based on such alone, there is no reason to suspect to find evidence of related crime at the operator's home. If Detective Gill had fully informed the judge in her application for warrant, the judge would likely not have issued warrant to search Jan's and David's home, because the fact that an IP address assigned to them by Wave G was on the list of Tor exit nodes means that there was no reason to suspect to find evidence related to that IP address at their home.

SPD's ICAC unit are trained on Tor. They know this stuff. They misled the judge and went on a fishing expedition.

That seems likely, but keep an eye on complaint 2016OPA-0288, filed earlier this week with Seattle Police Department's Office of Professional accountability.

Seattle's surveillance equipment ordinance was enacted after the SCL-ATF grease dumping incident. But SCL are still allowing ATF to secretly install cameras on SCL poles.

I and received e-mails that show Seattle City Light staff requesting that ATF install a camera on an SCL pole. Why would they go to ATF? Because ATF owe them a favor or two for all the times SCL let ATF secretly install cameras on SCL poles for ATF's purposes. SCL security manager Doug Williams keeps a list of those. I've received an improperly-redacted installment of my request for present and past versions of that list.

It doesn't. Seattle City Light requested that ATF install the cameras. SCL likely don't have their own, and their security manager, Doug Williams, regularly allows ATF to secretly install cameras on SCL poles, so when he wants some installed, he just calls his buddies at ATF.

ATF and others have multiple surveillance cameras on Seattle City Light poles. In the 2011 grease-dumping investigation, SCL contacted ATF to request that they install cameras so that SCL could catch the dumpers. I learned this by reading e-mails to and from SCL, mostly to security manager Doug Williams, I received via Public Records Act request.

I'm the Seattleite who dug up those records. ATF were likely not interested in people dumping grease. Seattle City Light were, because it was damaging their equipment. Since security manager Doug Williams at SCL regularly lets ATF and other agencies covertly install surveillance cameras on SCL's poles (which I learned by reading e-mails to and from him I received via Washington Public Records Act request), ATF were likely paying back the favor.

Care to address the issue at hand instead of throwing up strawmen? I don't believe that public servants spend much time in private situations while on the job. I'm not arguing that police don't deal with people at those people's worst moments. I'm not arging anything about the entertainment value of watching public servants on the job.

Whether or not the public have access to public records is up to the public to decide. The people of Washington do not yield our sovereignty to the agencies that serve them. The people, in delegating authority, do not give our public servants the right to decide what is good for the people to know and what is not good for us to know. The people insist on remaining informed so that we may maintain control over the instruments that we have created.

These have implications on our privacy, I agree. However, I think there is nothing wrong with the public going fishing for government malfeasance. With the extraordinary authority we give some staff, to harm people on the job in order to enforce our public policy, should come extreme on-the-job scrutiny. If somebody doesn't want the public looking over his shoulder all the time, the being an armed public servant is the wrong job for that person.

I don't believe that public servants spend much time in private situations while on the job. And if we need special teams of police who are assigned to go into people's homes, when invited, without camera, never without a witness, then maybe we should arrange for that.

Do you find it unreasonable for the public to demand access to the entire body of public records because of the burden on public agencies of getting public records out of the systems in which they chose to store the records, or because of people's on-camera interaction with public servants while performing their public duties?

Police departments are public-records-generating machines. A large portion of what their staff do is the generation of public records. With every new type of record they decide to create, they need to be thinking about how they will provide public access to those records. To do otherwise is to wall the public off from that which is our right to see. If cop gear suppliers like Coban, Taser, and VieView want to sell their systems to Washington law enforcement agencies, they better figure out a way to make mass-export of public video records to the public feasible.

I believe all of that is correct. Thus, police departments had better stop co-mingling releasable and non-releasable records and portions thereof. Making redaction so time-consuming as to greatly delay production of records is an effective means of circumventing our Public Records Act, and we should not allow our public servants to do so. This goes doubly for those public servants who have the extraordinary authority to harm people on the job.

If only there was some giant network of computers and a sort of web, world-wide, that would allow anyone who is interested to connect to machines on that network remotely, video could be digitized and provided to anyone wishing to review it, without the need to burn it onto physical media and transport it by post or carrier pigeon.