Aren't these the same thing to the technology? To someone labeled a criminal, the government doing so is an abusive government. To a government that considers itself right, those who don't follow the rules are criminals.
We each have our own personal views on what should and should not be allowed which we judge individual cases with, but technology does not have a sense of morality to make such judgment as to when the criminal is in the right and when the government is in the right.
I think people far too often try to humanize computer algorithms with notions of right and wrong. The technology to avoid and oppressive regime is the exact same technology that protects the horrible person from justice.
However, I don't think that's the case at all. We can see in the real world there are many ways to strike a balance between safety and privacy.
So how would this work online? "We have private chats, but the government can look into any of them at any time"? I suppose it depends on your definition of privacy ... are your chats still private if I'm unable to see them but your friendly neighborhood police department reads them?
The reality is everything can be misused.
1) With a car without a VIN number / registration
2) With a car without a license plate
3) With no driver and no way to know who was controlling the car.
The point is, it’s not good to be able to commit serious crimes with zero risk of punishment.
The issue at debate is whether the gain from the legitimate (legal) use cases of technology like this outweigh the loss of making it easier for sex offenders / drug traffickers to more easily subvert authority.
In that example, there is legitimate argument that SSL encrypted connections to more good than harm (it makes logging into your online bank possible on public Wifi, along with 1000’s of other examples like it).
But I’ve still yet to see a clear argument for absolute internet anonymity for anything that would benefit the average person (yet, I can think of dozens of ways it harms people).
It’s very likely that I’m just not aware of the legitimate (practical) use cases of TOR.
On top of that, let's say that you do become a suspect of a crime you didn't commit. Every little shred of information that can be found is going to be used to paint a false narrative against you. Why would you want anybody to have ANY information on you at that point.
Surely you've heard of "the right to remain silent" and "pleading the 5th". Anonymity online is the internet version of that.
It's true that anonymity is a double-edged sword, but it's better than having no blade when one is wielded against you.
anonymity doesn't make it impossible to be held accountable for your actions. people tend to (unintentionally) dox themselves without any outside help. what it does is make it a lot harder for law enforcement to catch people without specifically targeting them and investing resources.
I know you're an upstanding, respectable citizen who would never do anything illegal, but just think of privacy/anonymity as a hedge against that tiny chance that the government might actually make an unreasonable law.
It makes internet banking possible, period. Cleartext banking, in any public Internet context, would be simply unworkable.
Absolute anonymity should be the default. There is no need to justify it. It's the government that needs to justify it's need to know stuff about specific persons.
If you commit, or attempt mass murder this way, you'll probably be caught due to the amount of resources a law enforcement agency will spend investigating such a crime. If you put up an anonymous website distributing child pornography, but you're not the one producing it, law enforcement will spend several orders of magnitude less resources investigating that crime.
- Should the layperson be allowed to own weapons-grade plutonium?
- How about being able to buy and cultivate your own anthrax cultures?
- Why shouldn't I be able to spray DDT when it's super effective?
Sure, a screwdriver is design to screw, just as fentanyl is designed to kill pain, but in the hands of a bad actors they can cause different levels of harm.
I'm not saying Onionshare is good or bad, just that you need to step back at look at any tool and consider the net potential impact if bad actors are able to exploit it.
"I'm not saying Onionshare is good or bad, just that you need to step back at look at any tool and consider the net potential impact if bad actors are able to exploit it."
True, and that's why we must think very carefully before enacting laws that make this or that tool illegal just because some criminal found a destructive use for it; there are so many things potentially dangerous in the wrong hands that blindly banning them all would either be impossible or would bring us back to stone age.
You shouldn't limit smart people because some OEM is stupid and didn't think up an innovative use case when deciding and designing on the intended use of a product.
I am not sure where Tor fits into that distinction, and I think that's the issue.
Otherwise it literally just is information.
https://www.euractiv.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/10/...
(It seems that the difference may be in what exactly we consider to be a privacy violation. I would say that in the child-pornography case, the victim's privacy has been destroyed the moment the pictures have been observed and recorded by the abuser, and further reproduction is not a privacy violation because there is no privacy in the pictures left to violate. Since Tor and co. have no impact on the ability of a child pornographer to make the initial recording, they are an unalloyed good for privacy.)
Is this honestly how you'd feel about footage of someone you know being raped?? It should not be illegal to distribute it...? Can you explain precisely what you think the law should be?
1. Subversive technology becomes so ubiquitous and easy to use it's impossible to fight it. The government stops trying.
2. The government's control increases to the point of tyranny and people are no longer free.
I want the government to give up. Anything else will mean the destruction of the free internet and free computing we all enjoy today. I don't want a future where encryption is military use only because of laws that make it impossible to run code not signed by the government.
> But I'd at least like to see builders grappling with that balance.
There is no balance to be had. The internet contains the full spectrum of humanity. The very best and the very worst of humanity are both be found on the internet. The governments were oblivious for a while but now they want to narrow down the spectrum. As they impose laws and exercise control, the internet becomes safer but it also becomes less international and more regional. The flow of information is no longer free and unrestricted. The spectrum is narrowed down from both sides.
Sadly it will only get worse from here. I am happy to have enjoyed the internet while it was in its infancy, and I am sad that future generations will probably never experience it.
> Especially given recent prominent reporting around this:
Every article about encryption regulation is like this. Pedophiles and terrorists. Children in particular are the perfect political weapon. The exploitation of children provokes reactions in people that are so visceral they are ready to accept any law that would supposedly make it stop. Anything can be justified with these arguments and anyone who disagrees is labeled a pedophile apologist and instantly shunned.
This sounds like a good thing. It might come as a surprice but a lot of people in the sex offenders registry are there for victimless crimes (such as sending nude pictures of themselves when they were underage - consider https://metro.co.uk/2019/06/27/boy-15-made-sign-sex-offender... as an example of the >10 instances in news reports that I have read of such situation). The probation officer being unable to keep up with the technology that these people use will guarantee them similar levels of privacy that people like you and me have.
> https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/09/28/us/child-sex-...
Just an offtopic note, this site is painful to read (on the desktop at least). Whatever happened to simple text sites?
Dark sites of all types still continue to run uninhibited for the most part. From my readings, the major or at least known/researched security holes have been plugged already by the developers, and the rest of convictions have happened because of user error, not the technology involved.
If memory serves me correctly, one particular pedophile abuser was caught after years of being investigated because he was identified through skin marks (I want to say it was freckles on his hand, though I don't recall the exact details of the article) that led investigators to him, not anything technological.
I'm a proponent of total anonymity online because it allows for whistleblowers to leak information that is untraceable to them (again, without consideration of human error). In the case of Wikileaks, for example, even though they weren't on an anonymous network, it still led to the largest classified information leaks known, from NSA tools to national and international communications between heads of states, diplomats and everyone in between. The general consensus was that it was a good thing. I don't necessarily agree with that, but one can't discount its value.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/jul/13/shining-a-li...
From what I recall, most of these TOR sites are only taken offline because of some server misconfiguration or some other opsec weakness in the people who run these sites.
Seems a bit disingenuous to do this.
Why not sell drugs as a cop to arrest people for buying them... er wait... they do that too.
I agree with you that selling a dimebag to a teenager to bust them is shitty and shouldn't be done. But there's a world of difference between busting kids for weed and catching pedophiles. If they're taking these people off the streets I really do not care if they're "disingenuous" to get them.
If we allow the FBI to distribute child pornography, under this rubric we are basically allowing them to commit child abuse. We allow law enforcement to commit some acts -- like buying or attempting to sell illegal drugs -- which would normally be crimes. But we would find acts of actual harm to innocents by law enforcement abhorrent. For example, if an FBI agent posed as a hitman online and then actually committed the contracted murders, that would be abhorrent and not a legitimate law-enforcement use.
Either distributing CP is child abuse or it isn't. If it is, the FBI shouldn't be doing it irrespective of how many criminals they may catch by doing so, because they are further victimizing innocents. If it isn't, that calls into question the basis on which distribution of CP is exempted from First Amendment protection.
Oh wait, I forgot. Different rules apply to those in power.
If it was I wouldn't have a problem with it. The reality is, by running the sites, they are actively enabling what they consider harmful.
Consider other examples of police stings. When doing drugs, they often use actual drugs because the mere presence of drugs at a sting is not an issue. But when dealing with more dangerous material, they use fakes to ensure that people don't get hurt, and the times when they haven't used fakes it has been considered extremely bad and had people push for policies to change it.
In this particular case, the sites are not like drugs which are inherently harmless just by being present, but are far more dangerous material which results in significant harm to those the police allow to continue to be victimized.
Imagine if police ran a human trafficking front and actually kidnapped people, justifying it by saying they were working to get the guys running the whole thing. Would that be acceptable?
I think not.
When you let the rules slip eventually that slippage will be used against you.
History shows this...
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
If you think that running a sting operation to catch pedophiles is going to lead to a Third Reich-esque roundup and extermination of minorities I really don't even know what to say.
The patriot act and the revoking of rights without due process was sold as something to fight terrorists. Now we have common street criminals being charged as street terrorists to circumvent due process.
It simply is fact that govt is the most serious threat to citizens. This is why the constitution was created and the nation was architected as a constitutionally bound republic.
This tripe of "think of the children" has always been used to get more power by govts and will continue to happen.
I suggest an alternative: how about judging people by the harm that they have committed to others rather than their race, attraction, opinions, etc?
They need other people to use it to be effective. They aren't going to shut it down until they have a replacement. They might even control >50% of the network.
If there's truly a guaranteed secure way of doing things, the government would act a lot quicker.
The sense of security in anonymity is not false as long as the dark web continues to proliferate its services.
Your conclusion is invalid without providing further proof. If you want counter-proof, just visit the dark web one of these days. it's as vibrant as ever.
even if you had some perfectly anonymous, uncensorable medium with zero security flaws, people would still make mistakes and get caught. it's never impossible for the state to catch someone, but it can certainly be too expensive to be worth it. this is a feature imo, not a bug. it should be expensive to investigate people.
This is correct.
However, the building blocks of circumvention technologies (et. al) and the building blocks of basic consumer Internet services and communications channels are indistinguishable.
You can't preemptively disable secure, covert communications and also provide rich, secure Internet services (such as banking, corporate email, etc.)
It is very much "Free Speech or Stone Age".[1]
[1] https://blog.kozubik.com/john_kozubik/2009/06/free-speech-or...
Agreed. However, the building blocks of that authentication (and other security protocols involved) are the same building blocks used for covert communications.
That's not saying that on balance this shouldn't exist. There are of course good uses of technology like this. But I'd at least like to see builders grappling with that balance. Especially given recent prominent reporting around this: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/09/28/us/child-sex-...