Is this based on experience or assumption? I've had minor issues with Tor and VPNs abroad, when questioned about them. Brushing them off as a "security tool" usually worked.
A "human rights" tool, on the other hand, makes Tor dangerous to be caught using in many parts of East Asia. I find most Westerners (myself included until recently) don't understand the cultural and political sensitivity around the term in certain countries. OP's analogy to the Western treatment of anything rhyming with drugs is spot on.
This is a very high social cost in the west, and you can't pose with a tor t-shirt (like the dude in the photo) if that the narrative. You will be expelled from your students union instead of celebrated for supporting it. So, a typical westener tor-supporter does not want this image. But the typical westener is no the person that needs tor mosts.
Such a label in east asia would probably help. If the Singaporean police would assume that all tor users a looking for child porn (or just porn, that's illegal there) uses would fall in the vast bin various criminals. But not a political opponents, that are targeted with much more energy. The social cost of consuming (child) porn might be lower than being a dissident. And the prosecution might be less serve.
I suggest this is overstated, at least as far as Tor is concerned. While there are occasionally news reports about various crimes that utilized Tor as part of the process, more often the generic term "encryption" or "anonymizing software" is used in news reports. I think the general reaction to anyone wearing a Tor T-shirt would be indifference, save maybe one or two curious talkative parties.
I will admit this is anecdotal, but overwhelmingly when Tor has been brought up in the past in my workplace or during discussions, overwhelmingly the response has either been "what's Tor" or "oh Tor. I've heard of that. What is that exactly?". The idea of "expelled from student union" for being a Tor Supporter is completely outside of my understanding of what people in the US even know about Tor. Even so much as having a casual two-way conversation with a non-tech person about Tor seems like a foreign concept. Tor might catch headlines once in awhile, but when it comes to things like online privacy and anonymity, I don't think this is what the lay person thinks of.
I mean, just page through news.google a bit searching for "Tor". The news outlets covering it are pretty much tech-oriented; going just a few pages deep, only politico really mentioned Tor, and that was literally only to say it was used by the hackers during the Clinton email breach, calling it an anonymity tool.
I just don't think there's enough evidence to really say that the general public or even law enforcement really knows what Tor is, much less form an aggressive opinion towards supporters.
I remember when internet censorship was about to be introduced in germany. Blocking child porn was the stated intend. It was a good dammed awfull climate. The debate was a mine field. Lot's of people where vehemently opposed, but did voice their oppinion but in their in-groups where they knew people would agree with them.
The major reason we don't have these filter is few brave activists who stated that they, victims of child sexual abuse, think sweeping these crimes under the carpet instead of investigating them is unacceptable. A very, very clever spin. If it weren't for these people the social cost for arguing against censorship infrastructure would simply have been to god dammed high for the most of us.
If I couldn't have pointed to these people and tell that censorship actually makes it all worse I would have feared for my social standing and my physical well-being.
I understand very well Tor folks don't want that. But as said, the western user or developer is probably not the person to care about most.
I am not discounting your experience, it's more I do feel it's an exception. I do understand that you were using some exaggeration for effect, but my point was more that it's hard to get into an awkward conversation with the General PUblic (in the US at least) about Tor because the general pubic doesn't have the basis to even discuss it.
Perhaps I'm misunderstanding your point a bit (and I'll gladly admit it if I am), but by and large in the US at least, the conversation about Tor by the general public is non-existent. It arises when interested parties need it (for good or bad), but much like "hacking" or "encryption", it's a very poorly understood and disassociated term amongst the general public. Most journaists can't describe what it does, much less how it works. They know that badguys use it for something, sometimes, but even then they can't really narrow down what Tor's function was.
The discussion on any privacy tool is muddied by child porn - there's no doubt about it. And while the threatening question of "what do you have to hide?" when it comes to encryption isn't anywhere near as damning as the association with child porn, I imagine it's a brief and short taste of something much much worse.
However, I think realistically most of the Western Population is oblivious to what Tor actually is, just like they don't really understand Apple's device encryption, they don't understand why Heartbleed was bad (it just was), and so on. Some persons may have a strong opinion, and these strong opinions can certainly be dangerous. But I don't think the majority of the population would be swayed.
I bet if some large corporation came out with it, the government would have no problems. Because they could probably convince that company to let them monitor everything
But hey, if you decide to use a proxy that screams "I'M A POLITICAL DISSIDENT" with every packet you send they might just get interested.
It's really not as naive as you think.
Hit the nail on the head my good sir.
/edit: We had a massshooting in germany recently. We currently have a debate about police tool against the "dark web" as a source of firearms. Before that the goverment was not concerned about tor at all. After that it was very. The narrative about tor changed only slightly, and the governments stance changed rapidly. And the missions statment is a very strong source of narrative.
Goverments are not either good (supporting Freedom) or evil (supressing it's people), but do both things to some extend. It's not like Singapore wants a little freedom as possible for it's citizens. It just has very un-western values. If it though that tor does not get to much in the way it won't do much. OTOH German goverment might attac tor.
I would be surprised if the Chinese government cared about how Tor was being marketed. The change might help with propaganda but it won't change internal policy. What they care about is how it is actually used in China, and I'm sure they understand this better than anyone else except for perhaps the Tor Project.
As long as one can convincing argue that weight of the things they like about Tor exceed the weight of the things they dislike about Tor, you're good. Tor's pivot to emphasize human rights makes that comparison much harder to win.
More long-form they like some of the protection features---e.g., protection against corporate espionage from China/USA. They probably also like to use such technologies to spy on their neighbors in efforts to leverage that information to negotiate better trade deals.
This is a curious construction, one that I can't pin down to any kind of secondary-language issues. "Using Tor" is not the subject of that sentence, "who's looking" is. So, some people see Tor as suspicious. Who are those people, and why is it a problem? Law enforcement...anybody else?
What does it mean for Tor traffic to be demeaned by law enforcement (or $chosen_group) as by-default suspicious, and is this a good use of their time and resources? Is it a good way to solve crimes? History tells us that law enforcement, and by extension the government, will use bigotry to effect prosecutorial goals at least as readily as they will shoe-leather investigation. Defining Tor as suspicious-with-exceptions operates in the same sphere as asset forfeitture: prove you ain't.
Point being, I think it's important to be clear what is happening with Tor as a character in the wider world of politics and policy, and "using Tor" is something that I don't think needs to be justified. Passive voice also elides these serious issues by pinning results on nebulous activity.
"Using [Tor]" actually is the subject of that sentence. "Who's looking" is not the subject even of the dependent clause in which it occurs; "depending on" is introducing an adverbial clause, in which "who" is the subject, "is" is the verb, and "looking" is the predicate.
> Passive voice also elides these serious issues by pinning results on nebulous activity.
The passive voice is not used in the sentence quoted.
I recommend preferring rhetorical techniques other than grammatical analysis; even for someone with a solid understanding of a language's grammar, picking apart the way something is said tends not to advance the discussion as well as repling to content would, however dubiously it may be expressed.
> Passive voice also elides these serious issues by pinning results on nebulous activity.
No, no, no.
Firethief has already largely covered this, but: "Subject" and "passive voice" are grammatical terms. They have to do with the syntax of a sentence. Not with who performed an action, or whether that agency was clearly expressed in the sentence. There is nothing necessarily agency-hiding about the passive voice; conversely, one can hide agency quite well without using it.
Basically, go read some Language Log, they talk about this all the time. Hell, they've got a whole category for people complaining about the passive voice while not actually being able to identify when a sentence uses it: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?cat=54
(Edit: One particular post on the subject I should point out, I think -- http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1227 )
Or here's a whole paper by Geoff Pullum on the subject, with more examples than you can shake a stick at in section 3: http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/passive_loathing.pdf
Don't get me wrong, I like Tor, but I also understand the pragmatism in law enforcement being a bit interested in people trying that hard to hide what they are doing online.
> You propose running a Tor node or using Tor internally. Before, this was just something you could do. After Tor’s pivot, you now have to justify why the company should explicitly associate itself with banned HR activism and draw the government’s ire. Using Tor is now an additional mild liability for all of its non-HR users.
Using Tor already marks you as suspicious depending on who's looking, regardless of why you use it. The ideals or mission statement of the Tor project don't change this.
Tor suffers from the same impediment as the Bittorrent protocol; it is used a lot for illegal purposes, so a stigma of illegality surrounds the tool itself. By focusing on the legitimate use of Tor (e.g., as a human rights facilitating tool) the Tor project might actually improve adoption rather than frustrate it.