The Tor project took a political stance a few years ago for no discernible reason at all.
To me, Tor is a software project that runs a network that allows users to be anonymous. Period. That anonimity can be used for good or evil, and everybody has a different sense of good or evil. Rebranding the project as a way to spread western liberal values is, in my opinion, overstepping the boundaries of what a software project should be.
(One can see an analogy between this change and the changes Mozilla took with their software. Unfortunately, there's no "better alternative" to Tor like there is to Firefox)
To me this sounds completely bizarre. Why should a software project be apolitical and without values?
Tools like Tor or a web browser are not equivalent to a screwdriver or a knife. Google chrome is the way it is because Google does value money and power above people's privacy. The Macbook is not easily repairable because of Apple's values.
Tools do not exist in a vacuum, everything we do is political whether we like it it not. That's what political means, it amazes me how the meaning has been altered, especially in the US.
>Tools like Tor or a web browser are not equivalent to a screwdriver or a knife.
Only that they are. Tor is a software project that allows you to stay anonymous. You can use it to buy drugs, you can use it to whistleblow, you can use it to post intimate pictures of someone online, you can use it to circumvent the censorship of your government, you can use it to troll in forums. It's just a tool like a pen. Is a pen a political tool because you can use it to write the Mein Kampf?
>Tools do not exist in a vacuum, everything we do is political whether we like it it not.
It's precisely this attitude that is ruining the discourse in the west.
A pen maker is just as entitled (and socially obligated, in my opinion) to reflect on the uses of his tool as a software developer is, just as all tool makers are. Some tools are exclusively used for ill, some primarily used for ill, some dual-use, some designed for good and sometimes used for ill, some overwhelmingly good with occasional abuses.
Opiates are a tool, and the moral calculus of being involved in their industrial production differs from the production of pens. Guns are a tool, and the moral calculus of being involved in their industrial production differs from the production of pens. Some things are designed for apolitical reasons, and yet a politics emerges around their use. The Tiki Torch guys didn't build their product to be political, and yet when they saw their product used in political images in Charlottesville, they felt the need to restate their values, and acknowledged that their product had become enmeshed in politics. That's how things work.
Even the parent comment doesn't draw the distinction fully enough. Knives overwhelmingly serve a prosocial purpose, humans have an almost infinite need to cut objects, especially as it relates to food production. But the use of knives in the context of interpersonal violence does merit reflection, product updates, and an expression of values. I think knife companies should and likely do reflect on the full set of uses of knives.
None of this prescribes an answer to any given question, I am not the kind of person who thinks that someone should be forced to declare a particular thing. But your insistence that the process of the question itself is "ruining discourse in the west" is not a very thoughtful take.
If the makers of Tor have considered the myriad ways in which their tools are used and want to support some ways, disavow others, and design for or against others, I think that's great, and hardly ruining anything.
Haha that's what I was thinking when I wrote about the knife, but it didn't fit with what I had in mind very well.
I really like your comment and agree with what you've written, what I was going for (and failed to really spell out) is that by definition everything within the public sphere is politics. Everything that shapes or defines the relationships between groups or individuals is politics.
That's what one will find if he searches dictionaries for politics. But somehow the word has taken on new meaning and people manage yo argue nonsensically with it. I'm sure that people who argue like this against politics/things being political all have slightly different things in mind and noone understands the original meaning of politics.
> To me this sounds completely bizarre. Why should a software project be apolitical and without values?
Not all software projects, but certainly some software projects, specifically those trying to create infrastructure.
Over time, we have accumulated some wisdom that society is worse off when we try to politicize a bridge, so that only people with certain beliefs are allowed to cross the bridge, or make telephone calls, or use electricity, etc.
We want everyone to be able to make the telephone call and to cross the bridge. Even if they are going to commit a crime and the bridge helps them commit that crime. Even if they are not committed to western liberal values.
It is this type of apolitical treatment of infrastructure that provides numerous benefits necessary for the infrastructure to thrive:
1. You can't sue the bridge builder or telephone carrier if someone uses the infrastructure to do Bad Thing. This is necessary for the infrastructure to exist. Imagine if a telephone company had to worry about a kidnapper using their phones to make calls.
2. Much infrastructure becomes more useful as more people use it (network effects), in which case the infrastructure should not be fragmented where each tribe has to build their own rival infrastructure. It's more efficient for rival tribes to put aside their differences and have everyone use the same infrastructure. This is especially true in increasing scale situations.
3. Infrastructure that requires long term support and maintenance through a variety of different regimes will need to prove that it is not favoring one regime over another. For the bridge this can be government, but for a project like Tor, they will need the contributions of software developers that do not believe in the western liberal project together with developers that do. And certainly for users running exit nodes this applies as well.
Now against these benefits are the costs. Does it hurt you that your political enemy is allowed to also use the telephone to coordinate?
Well, from a pure power point of view, you would like to dominate and cripple them, but from the point of view of the infrastructure, no, them making a phone call does not prevent you from doing the same. So in that type of a situaiton, it's best to have a truce and say everyone is allowed to use and contribute to the infrastructure.
Now in some situations you can't have a truce because your hatred is so strong. Then you have war. That's when you deny your enemies access to your bridges while blowing up their bridges.
And they do the same to you.
But one thing about that state of affairs is that it's never good for infrastructure. When you politicize infrastructure, you get less of it.
So no, it's not a good idea to try to make everything political. This is true regardless of anyone's moral intuitions. It's an objective fact that society is better off when certain things are not politicized, especially infrastructure services.
> So no, it's not a good idea to try to make everything political. This is true regardless of anyone's moral intuitions. It's an objective fact that society is better off when certain things are not politicized, especially infrastructure services.
Our difference lies in the definition of politics. I am not from the US and I hold to a more original definition, everything that has to do with how societies are structured, are governed and how they act is politics. Everything within the public sphere is politics.
In your example, building a bridge is politics, letting everyone through is politics. You can't make or unmake something to be political. It either is or isn't _by definition_.
> In your example, building a bridge is politics, letting everyone through is politics. You can't make or unmake something to be political. It either is or isn't _by definition_.
That's not a definition, it's a philosophical position. A very toxic one that leads to dysfunctional societies and stuff not working and not getting built as people argue over politics.
I dislike some of the things we heard from the project and the drama surrounding some parts of the community. But I also don't believe this statement is overly political. If it were, western liberal values are indeed superior to any alternatives having a different perspective on this. Granted, such a project was founded in a country with such values, so why not live by it?
I think Tor has to demonstrate that such values are what the project protects in order to stop it being blocked[0] as a tool for criminals.
[0] And/or the developers arrested: I’m so not a lawyer that I wouldn’t know even if I tried to read the actual statutes if that response was even possible in the USA
can you explain why you think right to privacy and anonymity is a western liberal idea ? especially so since so many western liberal governments are adopting very harsh laws against privacy and anonymity
i would argue that it is simply a fundamental idea but sadly still a radical one, regardless on which part of the world you find yourself on
EDIT: by 'fundamental' i mean simply in the sense that the sentence, 'it is none of your business what i am thinking about', is fundamenal
It is a western liberal idea because it is clearly laid out in the founding philosophical texts which were written in the west (thus western) and which provide the theoretical definition for the term 'liberal society'.
Examples include Hobbes, Locke ( all persons are endowed with natural rights to life, liberty, and property), the US' founding fathers writings and debates, the French national motto of Liberté, égalité, fraternité, ...
You are correct that many/all western liberal governments are adopting very harsh laws contrary to these principles.
This does indeed call into question if these are still liberal democracies/republics.
It is the sad state of man that very few social structures are able to adhere to the principles on which they are founded.
> It is a western liberal idea because it is clearly laid out in the founding philosophical texts which were written in the west
i completely agree with this. however i think that today the phrase 'western liberal' is taken to mean as policies coming from brussels/washington, instead of ideas coming from the enlightenment period
it is also hard to divide judicial adoption of 'right to privacy' according to geography and political systems. for example, australia does not legally recognize the 'right to privacy' while russia does [0].
also curiously, as somewhat of an aside point, i just tried to find data retention laws in russia and this is best i could come up with:
"The Law on Personal Data simply provides that personal data should not be kept/processed for a longer period than is necessary for the purpose for which it is processed (unless longer processing and, in particular, retention periods are mandated by Russian law or by agreement of the data subject)."[1]
Of course this opens up the possibility for government mandated retenition, but do these laws exist? i would find it very surprising if they do not. does anyone here know? i am talking about written laws, not corruption or rule-of-law factors
Worse, by taking this position Tor has no idea what privacy is. Privacy is not anonymity.
Anonymity is the right to remain hidden independently of your communications. Privacy is the right to prevent disclosure.
If third parties can access your correspondence you have no privacy regardless of your anonymity. If anybody can assert your identity you have no anonymity regardless of your correspondence, if any.
The inability to separately define these terms sacrifices them both.
This is unnecessarily inflammatory, and just makes it sound like "Tor doesn't see things as I do and therefore they are dumb".
Practically speaking, the question of privacy largely disappears if you are anonymous. The two terms are not orthogonal, even if they are also not identical.
I think the point being made is that Tor is using the word privacy here where anonymity would be, in their case, much more correct. My view is that privacy gives them a better emotive spin (as witnessed elsewhere here).
"Anonymity is a human right" is much more likely to be questioned.
I would say the terms are mutually exclusive only because there is no expectation of privacy where a party is anonymous. This is reinforced against online communications in a very practical application by presence of digital certificates.
> I would say the terms are mutually exclusive only because there is no expectation of privacy where a party is anonymous.
But as an end-user, do you really care about privacy if you are already anonymous?
I can think of situations where you would. But for most scenarios, it seems to me that anonymity renders privacy a moot question. At least that's the case for me --- therefore I also think that the statement "the terms are mutually exclusive" is fairly meaningless, at least for my own online activity.
My intuition is a lot of "regular" people (i.e. the non-hackernews crowd) would see it the same way...
Your logic assumes the remote party in a transaction has no privacy considerations only because you yourself have anonymity. In a very practical sense it means they are not likely to disclose things to you.
Even still would you really be willing to give out all your financial and sexual preferences to a stranger even if you are anonymous? I suspect most people would continue to harbor reservations.
I see it more as a soft trade-off, than something that has hard limits. The more I trust my own anonymity, the less I worry and care about the privacy at the other end. And the more willing I would be to give out details that could come back and bite me if my anonymity was blown.
I see it more as Stockholm Syndrome to the web’s client server model. People are willing to abandon privacy to a web server out of convenience but that doesn’t sound emotionally appealing so they give up and pretend what they have is good enough.
My take is: Privacy is when people know who you are but not what you are doing. Anonymity is when people know what you are doing but not who you are (some people will argue this is pseudonymity but I disagree with them in a practical context). Basically Batman is "anonymous" and Bruce Wayne is "private".
There is also a difference between truly anonymous (where no connecting identity is established between different events) and what I'll call a form of pseudonymity (where an identity is constructed, with or without a known connection to one or more real identities, and that identity builds its own reputation). I do not consider Batman "anonymous" unless he does something without revealing that it was Batman who did it. Batman is pseudonymous, simply because "he" is a known identity, whoever may ever be behind it at any given time.
People in certain situations require anonymity for privacy. Anonymity is a tool of privacy, not always necessary but certainly necessary in some circumstances.
Privacy is choosing who knows what about you. Anonymity is a tool to do things in front of some people without them knowing who you are. Clearly if you don't want those people to know that you (your real identity) does those things, you require anonymity to maintain privacy in that respect.
> If third parties can access your correspondence you have no privacy regardless of your anonymity.
This is false. For example, a citizen in a repressive authoritarian regime can only protest the government "publicly" so long as they are anonymous. You can let all the world know that Anonymous4321 (if you have real anonymity) thinks the government is bad on Twitter and even leak government secrets. Sure, the protest will not be "private" in the sense that it is public, but the privacy angle is that nobody knows that the individual is involved in such activities: they can show up to work at the government the next day after leaking details about the government and nothing will happen to them. Clearly, from the perspective of their real identity, their leaking and protest activities remain "private" from the government even though the government very publicly is aware of the protests and leaks.
In the scope of TOR, it clearly helps individuals maintain privacy. I want to keep which sites I visit unknown to even my ISP; that is clearly your version of privacy. On the other end of the connection, I don't want the website operator to know who I am either; this is your version of anonymity. To me those are both just different aspects of the notion of privacy defined by: choosing who knows what about me--with that choice defaulting to knowing nothing about me.
Privacy is a broad category, anonymity is a piece of it, necessary only in some circumstances but generally desirable as a default. You can choose to give up your identity, you cannot choose to take the knowledge back from someone.
To me, Tor is a software project that runs a network that allows users to be anonymous. Period. That anonimity can be used for good or evil, and everybody has a different sense of good or evil. Rebranding the project as a way to spread western liberal values is, in my opinion, overstepping the boundaries of what a software project should be.
(One can see an analogy between this change and the changes Mozilla took with their software. Unfortunately, there's no "better alternative" to Tor like there is to Firefox)