Every day, to protect their anonymity online, hundreds of thousands of people use the Tor network, a collection of servers run mostly by volunteers. These volunteers, known as the "operators," risk jail or at least an unpleasant encounter with the law if the people who use the Tor network are up to no good.

The operators run what's known as an "exit node," the final point out of the Tor network after the user has been bounced randomly through three other servers, protected by layers of encryption. At that point, the IP address of the user is the same as the exit node, so authorities often think it's the operator who was doing the browsing. And while Tor is used by activists, journalists, and dissidents, it can also be used by criminals.

But some operators don't care, and believe the law is on their side.

Franklin Bynum, a criminal defense lawyer in Houston, Texas, is one of those operators, and he definitely doesn't care—or at least is not too worried.

"The FBI is smart enough not to serve a search warrant to a lawyer's office when is lawfully running just a piece of internet infrastructure," Bynum told Motherboard. "It's just a node on the internet."