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Support Tor and Intellectual Freedom in Libraries

act.eff.org

69 pointsfweespeech19 comments

A key point is this one:

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Faced with police and city concerns, library director Fleming agreed to turn off the Tor relay temporarily until the board could reconsider. “We need to find out what the community thinks,” he said. “The only groups that have been represented so far are the Police Department and City Hall.”

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The library's board and staff haven't heard from anyone but law enforcement / government ... so without other viewpoints offering another view they are at least temporarily bowing to that pressure.

Now, living in NH and knowing how our local politics work, I'm not sure exactly what a massive online petition is really going to accomplish. If anything, it may just rouse animosity within the local community. (We take "Live Free or Die" pretty seriously here - and that includes being free of outside forces trying to push us to do something!)

What really needs to happen is for some citizens of Lebanon, NH to provide an alternative view to the library board.

We are trying to encourage a very brave small town library to do something important, legal and slightly subversive.

It isn't often that signing an internet petition makes much of difference but this might be the one time.

EFF claims that "In mid August 2015 the Boston office of the US Department of Homeland Security contacted the Portsmouth and Lebanon Police Departments to warn them, falsely, that Tor's primary use is to aid and abet criminal activity."

Does anyone have a source for this claim?

https://www.propublica.org/article/library-support-anonymous...

> When the DHS inquiry was brought to his attention, Lt. Matthew Isham of the Lebanon Police Department was concerned. “For all the good that a Tor may allow as far as speech, there is also the criminal side that would take advantage of that as well,” Isham said. “We felt we needed to make the city aware of it.”

> DHS spokesman Shawn Neudauer said the agent was simply providing “visibility/situational awareness,” and did not have any direct contact with the Lebanon police or library. “The use of a Tor browser is not, in [or] of itself, illegal and there are legitimate purposes for its use,” Neudauer said, “However, the protections that Tor offers can be attractive to criminal enterprises or actors and HSI [Homeland Security Investigations] will continue to pursue those individuals who seek to use the anonymizing technology to further their illicit activity.”

On the first page, the brief reference to this is a link to this article: https://www.propublica.org/article/library-support-anonymous...

It does seem an oversight, since there are 5 or 6 citations in EFF's letter.

Also to be fair, is it proven that Tor's most popular use-case is something other than criminal activity? I know there are legit uses for Tor certainly, but it wouldn't really surprise me if criminals were the primary users

I don't know the answer to your question, but one thing to keep in mind is that "criminal activity" does not always imply "morally questionable activity". To use extreme examples, someone watching child pornography isn't the same as a journalist hiding from an oppressive regime.

Criminals are numerically the most common Tor users. But the difference is that what's "criminal" depends on your place of residence.

In America Tor is mostly used (other than as a curiosity) for drugs and child porn. The former I could care less about, while the latter is indeed creepy. It's also occasionally used for private communication with journalists, a numerically less common use but a politically critical one. While I strongly detest child porn, I equally detest drug prohibition and journalist and whistleblower harassment/censorship.

In Iran? China? Saudi Arabia? Russia? In places like that Tor is used for dissident communication and private correspondence with people overseas. In those places public opposition to the ruling regime can itself be a crime.

There are also authorities including police and intelligence personnel who use Tor -- very ironically to hide from criminals. For example, an undercover cop might use Tor to hide their correspondence with the police from digital snoops in the employ of a criminal organization they are infiltrating. Some organized crime outfits are very sophisticated, making undercover work actually require a degree of 'op-sec' on the part of the agent. Compromise can be fatal.

Tor is a gun. Criminals use guns but so do police, hunters, and people legitimately defending themselves. In America you could probably defend Tor and other crypto tools on second amendment grounds.

Please provide sources to support your argument.

Edit: Why would I be modded down for asking someone making claims (questionable ones at best) to provide sources?

Try this:

http://geekslop.com/2015/catching-pedophiles-running-secret-...

"... First, the pedo site saw magnitudes more traffic than the counterfeiting or drugs websites – in the order of 100 times more traffic than the other two combined. ..."

BTW I wasn't arguing that Tor itself is bad, just refusing to engage in the common denialism one sees among crypto and Tor advocates in claiming it has no bad uses. The truth is that many things have negative uses: guns, knives, security systems, Bitcoin, crypto, fireworks, spray paint, alcohol or virtually any drug, explosives, drones, cameras, etc. All those things have positive uses as well, and it's ultimately the user who is responsible for how they are used. Pedophiles use SSL too, should we ban that?

As far as police and intelligence agency use of Tor, look up some of the talks by the Tor founders in which they cite examples of these uses. In addition to undercover use, Tor is useful for law enforcement to hide their network location while investigating potential criminal sites online. Otherwise a site might easily see that the traffic is coming from a police or .gov site.

Traffic to hidden services makes up a tiny fraction of the overall use of the Tor network.[0] Any conclusions drawn from that use is highly skewed, and cannot be used to draw conclusions about Tor itself.

[0] https://blog.torproject.org/blog/some-statistics-about-onion...

Here are the stats by country. I don't think there any more detailed stats available, as not tracking is the whole point of tor: https://metrics.torproject.org/userstats-relay-table.html

  Country 	 Mean daily users
  United States 370492 (18.53 %)
  Germany  	 201280 (10.06 %)
  Russia  	 173453 (8.67 %)
  France         125916 (6.30 %)
  United Kingdom  87386 (4.37 %)
  Brazil  	  64918 (3.25 %)
  Spain  	  62547 (3.13 %)
  Italy  	  60229 (3.01 %)
  Japan  	  50234 (2.51 %)
  Poland  	  41437 (2.07 %)

You can draw your own conclusions from that :)

> Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech

What could possibly be done with a communications relay that would fall outside of this proscription?

Unless you just mean "criminal" in the age old non-rule-of-law sense, people who are shunned by society.

Rarely is the law interested in something like "most popular use case", or a mere plurality. There are different standards for different circumstances, but usually it's something like substantial noninfringing uses, like in Sony's famous Betamax case.

This example is from left field, but the reason I bring it up is that no court will want to know what a plurality of Tor users do with Tor. The standard is probably much lower than that.

Given this, what is probably more interesting is to catalogue different legitimate use cases for Tor. Then cite actual examples of real people using Tor in these fashions, and how their freedoms would be infringed if they could not use Tor.

For example, I use Tor regularly to see how web pages render for people other than myself. It allows me to check how personalized a website has been made for me. Especially with ads, if I want to guess at how targetted ads are to me, I can use Tor for comparison.

Holy shit, I live pretty close to Lebanon and had no idea their library was doing this! I'll have to check out any public hearings (if there are any).

Libraries are struggling enough, so I am not sure the inevitable complications of running a Tor relay will be helpful.

Libraries struggle for relevance in the public eye. Contributing to Tor and other technical projects helps that.

Exactly. It furthers the spread of information which is a core goal of the library. Check out the freedom to read statement: http://www.ala.org/advocacy/intfreedom/statementspols/freedo...

Further, the Core values of the ALA address these points as well;

"Intellectual Freedom We uphold the principles of intellectual freedom and resist all efforts to censor library resources. ALA Policy Manual, B.9.16 (Old Number 54.16) ( ALA Code of Ethics, Article II)"

"Social Responsibility

ALA recognizes its broad social responsibilities. The broad social responsibilities of the American Library Association are defined in terms of the contribution that librarianship can make in ameliorating or solving the critical problems of society; support for efforts to help inform and educate the people of the United States on these problems and to encourage them to examine the many views on and the facts regarding each problem; and the willingness of ALA to take a position on current critical issues with the relationship to libraries and library service set forth in the position statement. ALA Policy Manual, 1.1 (Mission, Priority Areas, Goals)"

Source: http://www.ala.org/advocacy/intfreedom/statementspols/coreva...

The only thing they should be concerned about is running an exit node, which they were not.

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