The Tor Project Defends the Human Rights Racists Oppose

https://blog.torproject.org/blog/tor-project-defends-human-rights-racists-oppose

by zorpner • 9 years ago

96 121 9 years ago

blog.torproject.org

mozumder6• 9 years ago

So, what are they going to do about it?

Why would you expect them to do anything? Racism is one of the least vile things of the vile things that Tor makes possible, and it isn't even illegal.

(Edit: Wording slightly changed to reflect point raised below.)

eeks2• 9 years ago

Tor does not support any vile things. It's a freedom platform. A tool. Honor is not in the blade but in the hand that holds it.

mozumder6• 9 years ago

So, why make a statement if they don't want to act on it?

I mean, if you're going to be neutral, say it. Don't say you're against something, when you're not.

guelo• 9 years ago

They addressed that in the article. They can't do anything.

dragonwriter10• 9 years ago

By design, there's pretty much nothing the Tor project can do about what people use Tor for. (Beyond publicly repudiating it.)

If they could, the whole idea wouldn't work.

xj9• 9 years ago

they make anonymity software

joelrunyon4• 9 years ago

But we can't build free and open source tools that protect journalists, human rights activists, and ordinary people around the world if we also control who uses those tools. Tor is designed to defend human rights and privacy by preventing anyone from censoring things, even us.

I feel like this is what cloudflare should have said. I understand they changed their mind after TDS claimed CloudFlare supported them - but based on the internal memos it seemed to be more of a "I was grumpy and they're jerks" decision.

The major problem with that being that once you make one decision like that - even if you're well-intentioned, the next person that comes after you might do it to the wrong people.

Maybe letting racists have a platform isn't great, but it's better than hand-by-hand justification of what is and isn't "appropriate" to host.

ajross5• 9 years ago

Maybe letting racists have a platform [is] better than hand-by-hand justification of what is and isn't "appropriate" to host.

Or, maybe it's not? I don't see that that follows. Yes, there's the slippery slope argument that someday a host could make a decision we don't agree with. But (1) hosts do that anyway, all the time, and (2) if fucking white power racism isn't on solid, level ground above the slope, then what else could be?

The solution to private sector choice about hosting and distribution of controversial content can't be a blanket protection for all speech. The first amendment is about public law, because of the reach of the government and the potential damage from abuse.

The solution in the end really can only be a case-by-case determination, individually by every host, as to what they are comfortable seeing on their systems. Which is exactly what we have here, even if CloudFlare's internal process was exposed as messier than we'd like to see.

dcow16• 9 years ago

Or, the internet has matured enough that we consider it a public utility and seriously form legislation that protects peoples' constitutional rights even on the internet. I literally don't see how anything TDS says is physically harming anyone. I've never been to the site, I don't give them my traffic, money, anything.. If you don't like them and find them so vile it's causing you mental stress then just navigate away and ignore the vile scum.

alethiophile3• 9 years ago

The answer is that this is, in fact, a slippery slope, because though TDS seem to be something that could be reasonably called actual Nazis (I honestly haven't investigated them to determine the validity of the accusation), we've also got an enormous cottage industry with a thriving amateur sideline of political activists calling anyone they disagree with Nazis. And it's entirely possible for the "X is a Nazi" narrative to get off the ground and self-perpetuate without any actual truth to it, with no one involved actually examining the claim. A lie can run around the world, &c.

If you agree to censor any category of thing, then you'll immediately have a large group of unscrupulous people attempting to cast all their enemies as that thing. The only general countermeasure is to not censor anything.

schmichael3• 9 years ago

One significant difference between CloudFlare and Tor is that Tor has no choice. Tor's technology is explicitly designed to prevent censorship. Any change to that would make it fundamentally a different product/project altogether.

CloudFlare on the other hand has no such limitations and has many stakeholders exerting varying levels of influence over who they accept as customers. From adhering to various laws to terms of service violations to more fuzzy reasons for terminating an account, these are decisions every business has to make quite often using a wide variety of inputs.

joelrunyon4• 9 years ago

Point noted.

However, up until this point, Cloudflare made a big deal that it was 'content neutral.'

It will be harder for them to argue that in the future given this precedent.

Proof• 9 years ago

This is a brilliant response. We must value Privacy and Security above all else. Once we open the door to oppress a group's voice we unanimously despise: we allow our own voices to be oppresssd in the future.

eeks2• 9 years ago

Exactly the comment I was about to make. Cannot agree more.

mozumder6• 9 years ago

Slippery slope fallacies are not a real problem.

You deal with the problem at hand now, not some problem in the far distant future.

Greedy algorithms exist and solve plenty of problems just fine.

216• 9 years ago

Why doesn't this also apply the other way?

White supremacists talk about killing jews and blacks, but so far it's only talk. The few which actually did kill somebody, like the car driver, got arrested. So why not let the police deal with the problem at hand instead of talking about how the white supremacists will kill many in the distant future.

Why is it not a slippery slope to say that allowing marches today will lead to genocides tomorrow?

MichaelGG• 9 years ago

Every expansion of "just for terrorists and child porn" to "well drug cartels too" to "well maybe drug users" and "people that have the wrong opinion" seem to disagree with you. Asset seizure is "ok" with people as long as it was only going to target Scarface-like people. But now you can be stopped and have your cash taken. Slippery slopes are alive and well.

And really, these TDS morons do more harm to their cause than support. Acting like idiots in public, hijacking a pro-white demonstration to start going off on the disproportionate representation of Jews in in the US -- it's a bad tactic. Silencing these low-credence trolls isn't gonna help, only make crappy martyrs.

Blocking TDS will probably be a net benefit for white nationalism and will do exactly nothing to stop "hate".

devindotcom• 9 years ago

Although I agree in some ways, I don't think "oppress" is the correct word when companies and others are choosing not to implicitly support a particular viewpoint and exercising their own right to free speech to oppose it in an organized fashion. Oppression suggests actions more authoritarian, and targets much more vulnerable, than what we're seeing. I think it is inaccurate to say that white supremacists are being oppressed.

dcow16• 9 years ago

I think the argument would be that TDS is operating at a scale where they cannot have the same reach they do without a CDN service. So a CDN to terminating their accounts is effectively silencing them. It would be the similar if Google decided to censor their results.

jacquesm23• 9 years ago

The Daily Stormer moving to Tor has very little to do with Privacy and Security.

And who are the 'we' that are oppressing a groups voice, they simply find it hard to get commercial entities to provide them with a vehicle for their hateful bits. Note that Aurenheimer is the guy who single handedly managed to drive a very large number of people away from Slashdot and who tends to come across as a man who relishes to watch the world burn.

Providing a service to such a character or not is the kind of decision a company should be allowed to make.

schmichael3• 9 years ago

It's not quite so simple. A tool that can protect privacy and provide security can be used to take privacy and security away from someone else. For example doxxing someone on a hidden service protects the doxxer's privacy but removes the target's privacy.

I'm not trying to make a moral judgement about Tor. I just feel it's important to acknowledge the best way to protect privacy is not always obvious and is rarely if ever simple.

wvenable2• 9 years ago

I had to ban all Tor exit node IP's from my service because of a single bad actor causing problems for a large group of people on a small service I maintain.

owenmarshall• 9 years ago

Looks like TLAs will have an easier time tracking racists, I guess. Not that they probably care.

0xbear• 9 years ago

I wonder if they find it in their hearts to denounce the purveyors of child porn who have been using Tor extensively and for many years. One of the reasons I will never run a Tor exit node: it is almost certain to at some point help them access the vilest shit imaginable, with impunity.

gonmf2• 9 years ago

Obviously people having opinions in an internet forum is much more important.

On a more serious note, Tor was meant to be used by people that want to say something that may run counter to the general, approved, discourse. That was a very ironic statement.

LukeShu• 9 years ago

Between the title-case and the omitted "that", I had a bit of trouble parsing the title: "The Tor Project defends the human rights that racists oppose."

intopieces• 9 years ago

I support this decision by the Tor Project and also the one made by CloudFlare. This is an excellent example of the need for both profit-driven/corporate software and open-source, voluneteer driven software. They serve different purposes.

jacquesm23• 9 years ago

The Tor project made no decision.

jacquesm23• 9 years ago

TOR project announces Tor still works as intended and gives more visibility to themselves and to hidden services.

The fact that Neo Nazis, Journalists and human rights activists all use the same service (though I suspect that all three of them are drowned out by copyright violation and illicit pornography) does not say much about the service itself, especially not when that service has been designed from the ground up to achieve that effect.

Cloudflare as a corporate entity with shareholders and customers is in an entirely different position than a not-for-profit entity such as the Tor project. Both are acting roughly as one would expect given their background.

gexla3• 9 years ago

Tor has similar constraints with the design of the TOR service as the US government has with the Constitution. Which I suppose is why you have groups like ANTIFA ready to trade blows and hackers ready to take down sites. You have the right to post the message, but then you have to face the response.

gonmf2• 9 years ago

You do not have to face the response, if the response is violence or hacking, because those activities are illegal.

Talking on the internet and organizing legal, peaceful, rallies, is fine in my book.

The US really doesn't care about freedom of speech anymore, which is spreading to the internet, and everyone is giddy to deal the last nail in the coffin.

gexla3• 9 years ago

As I posted in another response to my comment...

I don't have the right to punch a Nazi, but the law doesn't stop me from doing so. It may be a deterrent and I may get punished, but the law doesn't create a physically insurmountable barrier.

PrimHelios3• 9 years ago

You have the right to post the message, but then you have to face the response.

Actually, not being physically assaulted is a right, not the other way around. You can't just go around screaming "VIGILANTE JUSTICE!" just because someone you dislike got the shit beaten out of them, and then defend that by saying "It's my right to make you face the consequences".

By your own logic, somebody could literally torture you for posting this if they disagreed, and it would be okay because you're just facing the consequences.

gexla3• 9 years ago

We are getting tripped up on language here. I don't have the right to punch a Nazi, but the law doesn't stop me from doing so. It may be a deterrent and I may get punished, but the law doesn't create a physically insurmountable barrier.

In other words, you have the right to declare yourself a Nazi, but then you may become a target for people who punch Nazis. That's not an opinion or a belief, this actually happens.

We're also getting tripped up on assumptions. I didn't suggest that I support violence or hacking. I didn't suggest that violence or hacking is justified, let alone a legal right.

I was speculating that shows of resistance which escalate into unlawful action may be a result of groups which feel threatened but see no legal option to oppose that threat (actually, I didn't even say that much).

temp-dude-87844• 9 years ago

In my opinion, it's telling that the Tor Project has decided to post about this.

It's an open secret -- in other words, not even a secret -- that Tor and various other darknet and overlay networks contain, among other kinds of material, content that has been driven underground because of the risks it presents to its promulgators on the aboveground net. Depictions of actual child sex abuse, one of the most widely condemned sorts of material in a way that's nearly universal across societies, has been present on Tor-reachable hidden services for years, and the Tor Project seldom writes about this; it's simply accepted as a risk of the style of technology, much to the chagrin and moral unease of people everwhere.

Clearly they are addressing a recent development about a particular website, with relevance to the United States and its current struggle that was brought to forefront in the past week. The Project sought to publicize their stance to leave no doubts, but was this not something that ought to have been abundantly clear to a sufficiently objective observer? Doesn't the fact that a US nonprofit tending to a piece of networking software decides to weigh in on the matter of a single hidden service currently in the spotlight reveal something troubling about the pressures of public opinion in the US today?

Torgo• 9 years ago

People say roughly the same thing about Tor that they used to say about the printing press: bad people can use it to spread seditious lies, pornography, anonymous accusations against upright people. I suppose the defenses are about the same, too.

jancsika• 9 years ago

We are disgusted, angered, and appalled by everything these racists stand for and do.

Let's back up a second.

What's the mapping of online avatars on that site to human beings?

If it's 1:1 then I should continue reading Tor's statement.

1:1-times-N for any N other than 1 is quite unlikely so we can throw out that possibility.

1-times-N:1 for N = 10 or even N = 20 are likely and cheap. An echo chamber of ten racists doesn't warrant a response from Tor, while an echo chamber of hundreds might.

1:N:1 for N = 20+ is possible especially by state actors. A small group of paid scammers simulating activites of 1000+ racists is enough to cause noticeable social disruption.

So the next question is: does Tor devbase have a way to map medusa heads to torsos?

I think the answer is "no". Not only for Tor, but also Wall Street Journal, Breitbart News, The Guardian, and possibly even Reddit, Twitter, Snapchat, etc.

If I'm right about that, then I read Tor's statement as essentially eating the cost of having no way to effectively separate signal from noise and simply rolling up their sleeves and treating all noise as potential signal. That's as wasteful as it was in the 90s & early 2000s to simply eat the cost of reading everything in the email inbox and deleting the spam manually. But here it's more than loss of productivity-- its potentially confusing a large portion of reality with a simulation. And unlike the widespread cynicism that came with tv broadcast, people seem to have convinced themselves that social media and random sites/comment sections are an earnest and democratic reflection of some meaningful segment of the general population.

edit: formatting

bronzeage• 9 years ago

Cloudflare lost in the long run. Especially as a host of DDoS protections, which many websites with significant opposition and threats require. Next time a controversial site decides to find itself DDoS protection, I hope it will think twice before going to cloudflare. Because how will you tell if that when the next internet shitstorm comes and focus on your website, cloudflare will stand there for you. Internet is all about freedom of speech. Every one will have his stage, with or without your help. I would've somewhat tolerated cloudflare if they had never hosted TDS in the first place and just disagreed to do that. But this is just a disgusting populist U turn, led by the current internet trend.

I would write a disclaimer about how I think TDS is horrible, but I honestly have never opened that website once, and I feel like the need to apologize for defending freedom of speech is absurd.

91bananas• 9 years ago

I read up on this a little yesterday. What do you think about this site getting dropped from GoDaddy, then Google for T.O.S. violations?

I could just be ill informed, but it seemed like Cloudflare could have simply just done the exact same thing quietly. But instead they at first did nothing, after some criticism in the press did the CEO wake up in a bad mood to remove their protection. His blog and email read almost noble, then I caught up on the days prior and it made me think much less of them as a company, him as a leader.

Feels like you as a company should be able to do business with whoever you want, and will face judgment for it in the public eye, I have no issue with that. I have no idea where I'm going with this so I will stop now.

ythn2• 9 years ago

What do you think about this site getting dropped from GoDaddy, then Google for T.O.S. violations?

I think it's a little disturbing. On the one hand, I vehemently disagree with TDS and what they are saying. On the other, what if the political tide turns against my religion and my church's website is knocked off the web for being "anti-LGBT"?

I personally would prefer if domain registrars remained politically neutral. I'm hoping this is just an extreme case and that they won't do it on a wide-scale in the future.

ythn2• 9 years ago

Some freedoms have costs.

The right to free speech comes with the cost of a minority of people using it to say and promote hateful, hurtful, even evil things.

The right to bear arms comes with the cost of a minority using them to murder and commit suicide.

So on and so forth with lots of other freedoms we enjoy (driving, flying drones, 3d printers, etc).

It seems like it is trendy now to trade freedoms in order to reduce those costs I've listed. It's a shame though, because it's very difficult to go the other direction and gain more freedom in exchange for increased costs.

mozumder6• 9 years ago

Don't be the person that thinks "let's ban Nazis" is going to lead to everything in the world turning into Orwell's 1984.

You just don't have enough information about society to make your slippery-slope argument valid.

The world is a lot more complicated than what your simplistic slippery-slope model predicts. Deal with the problem at hand, not some distant theoretical problem based on your simplistic models of life.

You can ban Nazi expression now, and everything will be fine, because society has a lot of safeguards to prevent other bad things from happening.

Don't be simple.

OzzyB• 9 years ago

Don't be the person that thinks the world will turn into Orwell's 1984 in a blink-of-an-eye, it happens gradually, bit by bit over time.

Would you like me to list all the freedoms we've already lost? Or are you able to sufficiently navel-gaze and ignore them b/c of your simplistic view of how slippery-slopes work?

briholt• 9 years ago

It is a poor reflection on tech's echochamber when Tor has to re-explain the principles of free speech for the millionth time. We've already had this debate about Monarchists, witches, real Nazis, Commies, Satanists, Anarchists, blacks, gays, Muslims, and every other group at the center of a moral panic. And EVERY time afterward, when the hysteria ceases, we look back and think how absurd people were for thinking we need to undermine basic liberties in order to prevent the atheists from turning our kids gay or whatever. Yet every few years there is a new absurd moral panic that opportunists jump on to grant themselves authoritarian powers and there is a new set of gullible idiots that are eager to cede their rights to them. The world will be able to function fine with a few racist wingnuts writing on their loser blog. The world will not function when we start arbitrarily silencing people and granting fringe groups the greatest recruiting propaganda they could ask for.

dcow16• 9 years ago

I never understood the restriction on presidents being born US citizens until recently. What we've observed of late is a perversion of the basic liberties and freedoms that America was founded on. My hypothesis is that in part this is due to an influx of individuals who were not raised to value those freedoms and liberties within quite the same cultural context. (I'm trying to be very careful here please don't pervert my words.) This is by no means bad but my point is that it certainly is at odds with our own American cultural values. It is also supprising how many Americans I've met so easily prefer personal safety or cater to anecdotal passion and empathy. What's so ironic is ther it's these very values that have allowed us to become what we are today. Why are we so eager to throw those out the minute we realize just how powerful they are? But that's not the point. My point is that it's fine to entertain and exchange all cultures and ideas, but we've built a system of geverning people that depends to some degree on our own cultural identity. The key to true diversity is tolerance--the ability to firmly retain your own identity whilst co-existing with all the other ones. We cannot value freedom of expression if we are not willing to tolerate ideas that are different from our own. There's a word for a shared political/social worldview: uniformity.

The Tor Project Defends the Human Rights Racists Oppose

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