Coulde there be snitches among I2P peers or Tor relays?

Question

I have been hypothesizing a case where a legal owner of some digital asset (e.g. a software, film, music ,etc.) is worried about the illegal distribution of the copyrighted material and wants to hire a large number of machines to act as relays on the network to track down the illegal downloads and uploads of the copyrighted material. For this particular example if someone donates enough machines and bandwidth to the network and communicate between the machines they would very likely be able to track down some of the downloads.

Could this idea be turned into a source of business itself? Dominating the network first, and then selling out the information (IP address, time of access, etc.) to the copyright holders?

Answer 1

Could there be snitches among I2P peers or Tor relays?

The Tor network is made up of volunteer-run relays, and those relay operators could be malicious. A malicious relay operator could run many relays and attempt to deanonymize users, but they would need to run a large fraction of the network's relays to reliably track users.

For this particular example if someone donates enough machines and bandwidth to the network and communicate between the machines they would very likely be able to track down some of the downloads.

Most web traffic is encrypted, so proving that a user downloaded specific copyrighted material would be difficult.

Could this idea be turned into a source of business itself? Dominating the network first, and then selling out the information (IP address, time of access, etc.) to the copyright holders?

If relays were found to be doing this, they would be removed from the network by the directory authorities (see "Expectations for Relay Operators"). Monitoring or disclosing users' traffic may also break US wiretap laws, or other similar laws in non-U.S. countries.