| Carsten Agger on Sun, 8 Apr 2018 19:01:16 +0200 (CEST) |
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| Re: <nettime> Surveillance Valley - a polemic review |
On 04/08/2018 05:35 PM, Geoffrey Goodell wrote:
I'd say that part of the cognitive dissonance stems from the fact that this is not how it has always been presented by privacy activists. Specifically, Tor has been characterized as "NSA-proof" etc.Hi Carsten, On Sat, Apr 07, 2018 at 11:50:59PM +0200, Carsten Agger wrote:Does that mean that I'm accusing Tor founder Roger Dingledine of being duplicitous about this? No, but it *does* mean that I'm accusing him of being politically naive. If you want to stick it to the Man you really shouldn't be working for him.This is not a fair characterisation of the motivation of the Tor project leadership. The purpose of the Tor project has never been to encumber the legitimate work of any particular intelligence agency, and let's not forget that the FVEY agencies are not the only powerful organisations who are listening.
And that's a worthy goal & would be a worthy goal for an activist project that did not receive the support from nor serve the foreign policy interests of the US government. Not because I'm government-phobic, but because these interests are actually related to warfare and colonialism (furthering of economic interests, "opening" of markets, etc.).What Tor achieves is: (1) to provide a strong low-latency anonymity infrastructure for honest people seeking to protect the metadata about the origin or destination of their Internet traffic (dishonest people such as criminals do not need such an infrastructure to achieve anonymity)
Said anonymity can also be achieved by using VPN, though that requires you to trust the VPN provider.
[...]
Honestly, I don't want to support the mission of the FVEY agencies at all. I see them as part of the military-industrial complex that gave us the Iraq war, in all probability one of the most heinous crimes of the 21st century. Not to mention a large number of other things. I don't want anything to do with them if I can help it.I would also like to suggest that we can support the mission of the FVEY agencies even whilst working to keep them (and, importantly, everyone else) away from our metadata. And, incredible as it may seem, those agencies can even support our intention to do so.
You may disagree at this point, and that's fair enough, but apart from our respective political standpoints I'd prefer an important privacy tool to not be involved in this kind of politics.
And, if Tor is really a tool which is built and maintained in the interest of the FVEY agencies (since they seem to be the ones footing the bill), what is it exactly we're doing when recommending Tor to activists in Russia or China or Iran? In a way, we're giving them a tool which was developed by the US government to give them cover for activities against their own government. I see that as quite problematic in its own right. I can only imagine the outrage if Tor didn't exist and activists were promoting a similar tool developed by the Russian government and emphasizing how useful it is for leaking information.
Once again, I think a privacy tool promoted by privacy and human rights activists should be above this sort of politics.
Right now there are no serious low-latency anonymity projects with deployment and research attention comparable to Tor. Forgive me when I ask you not to stand in its way.
Given the information we've discussed in this email, which I discussed in my review of Surveillance Valley and which is presented in the corresponding chapter of that book, I no longer feel inclined to recommend the marketing of Tor as a privacy tool. And that's what I'm going to say if anyone asks me. But I'm just a computer scientist and free software developer in Denmark and don't really have the power to stop people from using this. I also have too many other things to do to make this my crusade, so I'll limit myself to presenting my thoughts if the subject comes up and I deem it relevant.
But I hardly have the power to stand in anyone's way. Best Carsten # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject: