I run one. I tell anyone who complains that's legal, explain Tor, and send them the form letter, and then never respond again. Three years running, and I've never been sued or otherwise affected.
Some may reply that is a legal risk as well. I believe it is clearly within the bounds of the law. If the police shut then down I would fight to the extent of my ability in the courts to have them restored.
I believe strongly in our system, and that all men and women (including law enforcement) are bound by the same set of laws, and are equal before them. Tor is legal under those laws, and the courts stand ready to vindicate my rights if they are violated.
What stops someone from masking their own behavior by falsely attributing it to a TOR user. That is, someone runs a TOR exit relay and whenever a complaint comes in for an action actually executed by the relay host, falsely attributing it to a TOR user.
The very same person could just use tor to begin with, without running an exit node at all. And from some perspectives, including mine, that's a good thing, at large.
Actually, there's a very simple and elegant answer to this: Tor doesn't save anything from relayed traffic to disk. So if forensic traces exist on the behavior, it was PROBABLY the node operator.
(I used to have a source for this, but I think I bookmarked it on my dead laptop.)
Not really, sometimes you need pcaps to diagnose network problems as an admin. I anonymize the IPs and shred the files afterwards. But recorded == operator is a bad heuristic.
