[susan_segfault]

Those are fair points. I would argue that it's not the tech that's weak, but that the protection that powerful people get from institutions, local networks, status in their communities etc. often give them so much access to practical power that they essentially don't need anonymity - because these institutions protect them.

In terms of condemning particular use cases (or deciding not to), I'm more trying to represent a particular argument that some people make about Tor (and lots of other technologies) - i.e. that the tech itself shouldn't carry explicit values/politics, those should all be down to the users. The argument is particularly strongly made by some privacy advocates as they see things like Tor becoming the foundations of a new Internet - and hence needing the broadest possible base of support. There's obviously a lot of good arguments against this philosophy, but I figured I should try to represent the different ways people think about Tor in as good faith as possible.

Obviously sometimes when people argue that they just have an issue with feminist values - sometimes it is definitely disingenuous. But I think there was a wider moment in the Tor community - in which a lot of people were concerned about the transition to a much more professional NGO, more strongly aligned with liberal, 'digital democracy' visions of US geopolitics, and away from a more chaotic and anarchic coalition. While I think there was a clear need for Tor to change and this was as much about its place amid wider changes in the landscape of digital rights, US tech, and hacker politics as anything else, it does give us a way (I think) of understanding the conflicts and choices that might emerge in Tor and other privacy enhancing infrastructures in the future.

[llm_trw]

>Obviously sometimes when people argue that they just have an issue with feminist values - sometimes it is definitely disingenuous. But I think there was a wider moment in the Tor community - in which a lot of people were concerned about the transition to a much more professional NGO, more strongly aligned with liberal, 'digital democracy' visions of US geopolitics, and away from a more chaotic and anarchic coalition. While I think there was a clear need for Tor to change and this was as much about its place amid wider changes in the landscape of digital rights, US tech, and hacker politics as anything else, it does give us a way (I think) of understanding the conflicts and choices that might emerge in Tor and other privacy enhancing infrastructures in the future.

Yes, you need to be a toxic slug or you will be eaten.

I was around for the transition and it was anything but clean. The only reason why tor didn't implode like women who code recently did is that it has a clear core product which the old developers kept chugging along despite the best efforts of the new 'professionals'.

[doctorpangloss]

> because these institutions protect them.

All I am saying is that you could replace your antagonists in that line with "journalists" and you'd be like, "no wait, that's not true," and you'd be as wrong about journalists as anyone else.

Either there are some powerful institutions protecting journalists too, OR Tor is powerful enough to protect journalists. If it's not good enough for journalists, why bother? If it's good enough for journalists, listen, it's also good enough for criminals.

Anyway, some journalists are themselves powerful people! Maggie Haberman, John Carreyrou and Ronan Farrow are powerful people, and they don't need anonymity. There are powerless criminals too, I'm sure, who need anonymity to engage in criminal conduct without getting caught. You could live on an island with a Starlink Internet connection, literally divorced from institutions and communities, and you could engage in anonymous criminal activity with Tor, it would be your only way of doing that. It would be practicable and realistic. Where we really disagree is: I think the average person already lives in a metaphorical island, this isn't a fringe opinion, and thus no matter what they are doing, Tor is providing them not with anonymity - they are already anonymous in almost all ways that matter, already nobody cares what the average person is up to - Tor is providing them protection from law enforcement.

> chaotic and anarchic coalition

Those high drama characters were the only ones foolish enough to run exit nodes or relays. I am confident this is true but I have not investigated: not a single professional NGO employee or grant recipient, living in New York or Los Angeles, under the age of 40, is personally running a Tor exit node.

Those professionals are absolutely correct in their assessment that they would receive a much harsher punishment for so much as breathing on the third rail criminal activity on Tor compared to their colleagues who engage in some civil disobedience on highways here or there. And without exit nodes or relays, there's no Tor.

[susan_segfault]

I would absolutely agree that there's journalists who get significant power and protection from their proximity to major institutions and centres of power. Tor is useful for protecting journalists in situations where they don't have access to that kind of protection. I would agree as you say that's also the case for people that it protects who want to commit really awful forms of harm (who might not have access to this kind of protection). But I'd argue that - in most cases - the majority of really serious and widespread forms of harm are able to exist because of their proximity to different kinds and systems of power. That's not always the case - and these systems of power can compete with one another - but I think it generally holds.

And given that the vast majority of online crime of all kinds isn't anonymous but goes entirely un-enforced against by law enforcement, I would argue that Tor's efforts to distribute power online make relatively little impact on the kinds of crime and harm we see online compared to a lot of other infrastructures built on top of the Internet. I've generally found the more I do this kind of research, the less convinced I am by technical fixes to major social problems - I don't think Tor is a 'fix' to the problem of power, but I think it opens up the battleground a bit for more different (and possibly more hopeful) kinds of future Internet to be built and asserted, that look less like the locked down and centralised versions we're being pitched just now. But I take your points and appreciate you engaging with the arguments in the book.

Actually the relay community is pretty diverse - they have some colourful characters but actually a lot of them are just IT professionals, activists, and people working for libraries or universities. They have come up with some ways (which I talk about in the book) of making them much less likely to get hassle for running an exit - and generally most exit relay operators proceed just fine.

[doctorpangloss]

> Actually the relay community is pretty diverse - they have some colourful characters but actually a lot of them are just IT professionals, activists, and people working for libraries or universities.

Unless the son or daughter of an important politician, journalist or rich person, there are no pedigreed Ivy League people under 40 running exit nodes. No chance. There are tons of them working for NGOs. I am just trying to distill the cultural divide that people are really complaining about.

A great example of this is the Stanford student who won that journalism award, who was the son of a very important New York reporter. No chance a "normal" student would have gotten away with the campaign against the admins that he did, and yet, he gets the award! I mean bless his heart, but when talking about the most laudable aspect of Tor - protecting journalists - there's a complicated story there too, with bitter rivalries and dramas, that really characterize the "hair on fire" problem for most journalists.