The Tor Project Defends the Human Rights Racists Oppose
blog.torproject.org
blog.torproject.org
I feel like this is what cloudflare should have said. I understand they changed their mind after TDS claimed CloudFlare supported them - but based on the internal memos it seemed to be more of a "I was grumpy and they're jerks" decision.
The major problem with that being that once you make one decision like that - even if you're well-intentioned, the next person that comes after you might do it to the wrong people.
Maybe letting racists have a platform isn't great, but it's better than hand-by-hand justification of what is and isn't "appropriate" to host.
Or, maybe it's not? I don't see that that follows. Yes, there's the slippery slope argument that someday a host could make a decision we don't agree with. But (1) hosts do that anyway, all the time, and (2) if fucking white power racism isn't on solid, level ground above the slope, then what else could be?
The solution to private sector choice about hosting and distribution of controversial content can't be a blanket protection for all speech. The first amendment is about public law, because of the reach of the government and the potential damage from abuse.
The solution in the end really can only be a case-by-case determination, individually by every host, as to what they are comfortable seeing on their systems. Which is exactly what we have here, even if CloudFlare's internal process was exposed as messier than we'd like to see.
The idea that public utilities (e.g. public broadcast spectrums) must conform to a negotiated standard of decency is well-established even at the court level. It wouldn't necessarily be protected free speech, even if the publically-accessible internet were a public utility (which it isn't), especially if private alternatives exist (which they do, e.g. tor).
That's your fault for not knowing about their propensity to violence.
Their rally this week resulted in 3 deaths.
If you agree to censor any category of thing, then you'll immediately have a large group of unscrupulous people attempting to cast all their enemies as that thing. The only general countermeasure is to not censor anything.
These mass conversations quickly devolve from debates to name-calling and the click-incentivized media is quick to encourage it (more outrage = more clicks = more ads = more $)
Being called e.g. a feminazi by right wing nutjobs happens every day. I don't believe CloudFlare has ever canceled the registration of a feminist site because of it.
This situation was different. It was more serious. The crimes were more obvious, and more hateful. And it's simply not about the name-calling that you think you see against whoever your favorite group (gonna guess "not feminists") on the internet is.
And when serious evil shit happens, I want to live in a world where I can trust moral people to agree that it's serious and evil, and not equivocate to make a bunch of glibertarians feel better.
You don't need to infer who my "favorite groups" are. I'm more interested in actual discussion than playing team games. Some of my favorite people in the world to talk with have complete opposite viewpoints from me. We may not agree, but being able to hold a civilized discussion helps each of us learn. That would never happen if we didn't talk and just called each other names.
[1] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/kkk-klu-klu...
It honestly seems like you're saying that companies like CloudFlare can't take a stand against real-life, actual nazis because Godwin's Law happened.
And that's why folks like me are so utterly horrified by the behavior of our seemingly moral counterparts on the right. We watched political discourse go off a cliff in the past few days and you guys all want to just wave it off as no big deal and have an argument about statues and domain hosting and stuff. It's a big deal. Not something to Godwin about.
Sorry, who has lost domain hosting because of an unfounded accusation of nazism? This sounds like a straw man to me, informed more from a tribal allegiance than an actual concern.
This doesn't address the fundamental point: that if you declare a willingness to censor anyone, then you'll immediately have a whole lot of people trying to convince you that their personal enemies fall in the censor-worthy category. I don't trust domain registrars or CDNs to be the final arbiters of Who Really Is a Nazi.
How is that what happened, though? This is explicitly an internal decision. CloudFlare made it on its own, without input. They didn't "declare" themselves "willing" to do anything.
Isn't their behavior exactly the solution to the problem you're straw-manning? You allow individuals in the private sector to make their own moral decisions about hosting. Problem solved.
I mean, I'll just say it again: if you can't trust a hosting/distribution agent to make their own decision about white power racism, then you live in a bleak world without any effective morality. That might work within your safe spaces on the internet, but those of us in the real world need to trust each other to get stuff done.
CloudFlare on the other hand has no such limitations and has many stakeholders exerting varying levels of influence over who they accept as customers. From adhering to various laws to terms of service violations to more fuzzy reasons for terminating an account, these are decisions every business has to make quite often using a wide variety of inputs.
However, up until this point, Cloudflare made a big deal that it was 'content neutral.'
It will be harder for them to argue that in the future given this precedent.
When you're in an incredibly emotional place, you'll wish you had infinite power to crush the demons. But once the emotions subside, you'll remember that there are no demons, just other emotional people (like yourself) and be glad your calm-minded self put barriers around what extreme-emotion-you can do.
In a sense, it's worth asking if extreme-emotion is the root cause of modern violence (nationalism, us-vs-them, victimhood rhetoric [Nazi's perceived themselves victims of Jews]).
When we lean-in to our emotional reactions, it's easy for the emotional reaction (e.g. War in Iraq) to be worse than the original spark (9/11).
At the same time, the ghosts of 6 million dead Jews and untold numbers of dead allied soldiers would like a word with you about whether or not they died in vain or if we maybe did learn a lesson.
(According to estimates over 30 times more innocent civilians died in the Iraq conflict than died in 9/11 attacks [1])
As for the holocaust, I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. My point is that allowing yourself to get emotional, even when you think you're right, is how all of the tragedies of the world happened (including the Holocaust). Those German soldiers thought they were doing the right thing, because they were swept up in emotion. Not because millions of evil people were all born at once in Germany in the 1900s.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War#Ira...,
Well, we could and we did but invading Iraq was something that was still on GWB's bucket list and so he did.
What people thought didn't really matter.
> If you look at the civilian deaths it really becomes a big "Wait... are we the baddies?" situation.
It was pretty bloody obvious. See Dr. Kelly.
> As for the holocaust, I'm not sure what point you're trying to make.
The point I'm trying to make, and I'll spell it out, just so that it is absolutely clear is that Neo Nazis are one step worse than the Nazis of old in that they are knowingly and willingly participating in a re-run of history that we should avoid at all costs, especially because we already know how that particular movie ends.
> My point is that allowing yourself to get emotional, even when you think you're right, is how all of the tragedies of the world happened
No, emotion has fuck all to do with this. It's simply logic. Nazis : bad.
> Those German soldiers thought they were doing the right thing, because they were swept up in emotion.
They were lied to and they were conscripted. Many of them would have backed out if that would not have led to a bullet to the head.
> Not because millions of evil people were all born at once in Germany in the 1900s.
No, but it only took a relatively small amount of those evil people to take over the country. Note how the GOP and all the other presidents men are standing by as Trump is destroying America as we know it and have come to cherish and respect it while we're watching.
How far it will be allowed to go down will be a big factor in how many casualties this round will bring. 10's, 1000's, millions? Who is to know as long as all the good little people are standing by the side it might go very far indeed.
And somehow I doubt they'd support the free flow of information.
No, we all didn't, especially those of us who had already been pointing out, before 9/11 and even before the 2000 election, that Cheney, as well as others in the campaign and later administration, had been pushing for war with Iraq under a variety of different pretexts for years. And not the 127 Representatives and 23 Senators who voted against even conditional authority for the war. And, arguably, not many of the representatives and senators who voted for the conditions regarding determinations that had to be made for the war.
I would write a disclaimer about how I think TDS is horrible, but I honestly have never opened that website once, and I feel like the need to apologize for defending freedom of speech is absurd.
I could just be ill informed, but it seemed like Cloudflare could have simply just done the exact same thing quietly. But instead they at first did nothing, after some criticism in the press did the CEO wake up in a bad mood to remove their protection. His blog and email read almost noble, then I caught up on the days prior and it made me think much less of them as a company, him as a leader.
Feels like you as a company should be able to do business with whoever you want, and will face judgment for it in the public eye, I have no issue with that. I have no idea where I'm going with this so I will stop now.
I think it's a little disturbing. On the one hand, I vehemently disagree with TDS and what they are saying. On the other, what if the political tide turns against my religion and my church's website is knocked off the web for being "anti-LGBT"?
I personally would prefer if domain registrars remained politically neutral. I'm hoping this is just an extreme case and that they won't do it on a wide-scale in the future.
Yes, what then? Shall we solve that problem when we have it?
Because you can fantasize and theorize until the cows come home about how your religion and your church will be knocked off the web but in the meantime that never happened and it very likely never will and if and when it does you will find a lot of voices sympathetic to your cause, including mine.
Or are we somehow beyond being able to evaluate things on merit?
> I'm hoping this is just an extreme case and that they won't do it on a wide-scale in the future.
Yes, it is an extreme case. And no, it most likely - you can't deal in absolutes - won't be done on a wide scale in the future.
It is entirely right and proper to consider the likely future implications of an act before you decide it's a good idea. Even if it feels really good to stick it to $OUTGROUP just this one time.
Why would I do that? I'm fine with bakeries getting sued for not catering gay weddings, that's one of the advantages of living in a normal society: the ability to petition the courts to seek redress.
Public accommodation laws for sexual orientation were passed in some states before then, and it's a fairly trivial and obvious application of those laws.
So I expect nothing less then pure self-interest. I would never expect freedom of speech as it isn't guaranteed like against a state actor.
The right to free speech comes with the cost of a minority of people using it to say and promote hateful, hurtful, even evil things.
The right to bear arms comes with the cost of a minority using them to murder and commit suicide.
So on and so forth with lots of other freedoms we enjoy (driving, flying drones, 3d printers, etc).
It seems like it is trendy now to trade freedoms in order to reduce those costs I've listed. It's a shame though, because it's very difficult to go the other direction and gain more freedom in exchange for increased costs.
You just don't have enough information about society to make your slippery-slope argument valid.
The world is a lot more complicated than what your simplistic slippery-slope model predicts. Deal with the problem at hand, not some distant theoretical problem based on your simplistic models of life.
You can ban Nazi expression now, and everything will be fine, because society has a lot of safeguards to prevent other bad things from happening.
Don't be simple.
Would you like me to list all the freedoms we've already lost? Or are you able to sufficiently navel-gaze and ignore them b/c of your simplistic view of how slippery-slopes work?
You deal with the problem at hand now, not some problem in the far distant future.
Greedy algorithms exist and solve plenty of problems just fine.
White supremacists talk about killing jews and blacks, but so far it's only talk. The few which actually did kill somebody, like the car driver, got arrested. So why not let the police deal with the problem at hand instead of talking about how the white supremacists will kill many in the distant future.
Why is it not a slippery slope to say that allowing marches today will lead to genocides tomorrow?
Do yourself a favor and open a history book. Regions of interest: Germany, roughly 1932-1945, South Africa, 1948-1991.
The world is not what it was 70 years ago.
Today when a genocide happens somewhere on Earth the UN quickly intervenes. The US is not some weak-ass state like Germany was in the 30s, even if Trump would order some sort of genocide today it would quickly be blocked at many levels.
Indeed, it is worse in many respects, better in others.
For instance: 70 years ago it took a couple of days to organize something involving ten thousand people. Now you can do that in 10 minutes with a social media post in the right spot.
> Today when a genocide happens somewhere on Earth the UN quickly intervenes.
You do realize that the largest participant in such peacekeeping missions has decided to abdicate?
> The US is not some weak-ass state like Germany was in the 30s
You are significantly under-estimating the strength of pre-war Germany in spite of having been beaten in World War I. In fact, you could easily argue that it was specifically this kind of under-estimation that directly led to World War II.
> even if Trump would order some sort of genocide today it would quickly be blocked at many levels.
It would never play out like that. Trump is not going to order some sort of genocide directly. He'll simply stand aside while others do the dirty work and he'll lament at how terrible it is that they are resisting causing violence on both sides.
One of my theories about why the GOP does not want to throw Trump out is that they are - rightfully - scared of what kind of backlash that will cause and that they hope against hope that they will be voted out in 2018 so others will be seen as responsible for throwing the lit fuse into the armory.
I think you'll agree that a systematic genocide like the ones you mention where you go into a city and round people up cannot happen. That would require the police, national guard, army to stand down and allow it.
So we are left with small scale attacks, the kind terrorists do. We need to fight and guard against those, infiltrate the cells and arrest anyone actually planning such thing, but they are not in the category of genocide, especially because in a genocide the killers walk away with nothing happening to them (because they are protected by the state), but in a terrorist attack you either die or are quickly caught.
Oh, but we already have a small precursor to that, the ICE raids on immigrants. There will always be people willing to ride the trains and to man the guard towers, good Christians too.
Let's hope it does not go further than it has already done.
> So we are left with small scale attacks, the kind terrorists do.
I'm not sure of that. The whole 'unite the right' movement is about connecting all the little dots into a wave large enough that it would be hard to put down without the national guard or the army stepping in, who could very well have sympathizers in their own ranks.
> We need to fight and guard against those, infiltrate the cells and arrest anyone actually planning such thing, but they are not in the category of genocide.
Yes, that is exactly what they said in 1933 about Hitler and his merry band of followers.
And then in 1934 the tables were turned and suddenly there was no way back, from that point forward WWII was inevitable.
Edit: I've taken some time to find this article in Der Spiegel, I read it long ago and I found it to be quite informative about Hitlers rise to power:
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/the-fuehrer-myth...
edit2: On another note, please note that Germany at the time was the superpower in Europe.
It says he had total control over the media, and that he had huge approval. Neither is true today. The last three presidents (Bush, Obama, Trump), were around 60% (excluding 9/11) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_app...
Also, what would be the unifying sentiment that the white supremacists would unite the whole country around, like this:
> For the vast majority of Germans, the restoration of national pride and military strength, the overthrowing of the Versailles Treaty and the expansion of the Reich to incorporate ethnic Germans from Austria and the Sudetenland were goals in themselves
Oh, that's all fake news.
> restoration of national pride and military strength
Is exactly what is happening in the USA right now.
> the overthrowing of the Versailles Treaty
The United States just backed out of a whole slew of treaties which it considered 'unfair' to the country.
> the expansion of the Reich to incorporate ethnic Germans from Austria and the Sudetenland were goals in themselves
Well, fortunately such an accident of Geography is not present in the current situation.
This was not the case when Hitler first became Chancellor or, even moreso, when his faction first took undisputed control of the Nazi Party.
It was true sometime after he'd done both, and used the propaganda power (and coercive power) of both the state and party to secure his hold on the public. (One clear difference, whatever parallels there might be, is that Trump only really started the fight for undisputed control of the GOP after becoming President; that makes the internal fight much more visible to outsiders, but also wants if he wins it, he won't have as many other barriers to cross to implement his plans as Hitler did after taking over the Nazis.)
That's not fair. Humanity is not yet at the stage where it can allow anybody to live wherever they want. I also can't move to the US without a visa, not legally at least. And if I do it illegally, I can't complain if I get raided one day. It's not a human right yet to live in the US.
BTW, those kind of raids also happen in Europe. Yes, they make be feel bad, but unless we go for radical taxation and basic income (including for immigrants), I don't see how we could not have them.
I agree they are not fair.
No, it doesn't, and it only intervenes, at all, in fairly weak states, or where geopolitical interests of the sole superpower align with the intervention.
> The US is not some weak-ass state
Which is why a violent racist faction rising to power in the US is particularly frightening, globally as well as locally.
That one? You're joking, right?
http://www.politifact.com/personalities/dinesh-dsouza/statem...
Which might add credibility to statements contrary to that bias, but not so much otherwise.
Clearly. That's well-known. I'm just saying that the argument from authority being made actually was supported by evidence of ideology, not authority.
I’m not speculating on the quality of the work, based on the identity of the author or any other information, only stating that (aside from a clue as to it's likely ideological bias, which might be relevant to some) no reason has been presented to overcome pre-existing skepticism about the value of the book noted upthread by a different commenter.
Because you just mentioned the title and that's what popped up.
> I mean the currently bestselling:
That it is bestselling does not make it true and that particular author has a stench around him you can smell from a mile away. The last thing I'll do is send the cretin my $.
Ironically, and I'm saying this without having read the book as you already know, but I would not be surprised if for once the title actually accurately conveyed the contents of the book.
Far more blacks died to state (or any other) violence during free democratic South Africa than during apartheid South Africa. It is simply dishonest to categorise apartheid South Africa with Nazi Germany.
Your argument is roughly analogous to people saying that Hitler had the trains running on time.
Sure under apartheid there was less overt violence and you could easily argue that South Africa was safer and altogether a better place to live back then than it is today. But that would be entirely missing the point of why Apartheid is wrong.
Do your ideals have a metric by which they may be considered?
Do you believe the 'lesser of the two evils' to be a false dichotomy for this case?
Or when the Dutch traded the occasional slave but Surinam was an orderly place that it was ok?
I strongly believe that there are things that humanity should not engage in, slavery, human trafficking and Nazism are on that list.
There is no 'lesser of two evils' when those are involved.
The historical alternative to slavery was mass murder. Dan Carlin will tell you that.
> There is no 'lesser of two evils' when those are involved.
There kind of is. It takes no imagination on my part to come up with dozens of historical examples of Bad, Badder and Worse.
Remember, we're talking about self-declared Nazis, not your average racist.
How else would you deal with a group that says "I'm going to kill you"?
Don't be the idealistic engineering nerd that only acts on theory. Be the practical socialized person that knows how the real world works.
I never in my life had watched a neo-nazi talk before last week. Since last week I've watched about an hour of their talk, first on Vice and then searching for one of the guys on Youtube. Streisand effect. How many vulnerable minds will be turned by this exposure? If they had their little march and the left ignored them, or even better, laughed at them for how silly they look with their nazi flags, they wouldn't be on all TV's and we wouldn't be discussing them.
No, it's not. E.g., http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2015/06/18/white_extr...
[replaced with non-AMP link]
edit
I mean troubling at a social/political level. The death of a non-violent protester is no less sad or serious.
Is what I was responding to. As for that other book, you're on your own there.
Let's see it.
"Two top Democratic strategists have exited the presidential campaign after explosive undercover videos showed them discussing voter fraud and their roles in planting paid agitators at campaign events for Republican candidate Donald Trump.
Robert Creamer, founder of Democracy Advocates and the husband of Rep. Janice D. Schakowsky, Illinois Democrat, stepped down from the campaign Tuesday, a day after Scott Foval was fired from his post as national field director of Americans United for Change."
So, at least they lost their jobs.
More about this:
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2016/oct/20/...
I fail to see the link with the Neo Nazis being booted out by CF though.
And really, these TDS morons do more harm to their cause than support. Acting like idiots in public, hijacking a pro-white demonstration to start going off on the disproportionate representation of Jews in in the US -- it's a bad tactic. Silencing these low-credence trolls isn't gonna help, only make crappy martyrs.
Blocking TDS will probably be a net benefit for white nationalism and will do exactly nothing to stop "hate".
And who are the 'we' that are oppressing a groups voice, they simply find it hard to get commercial entities to provide them with a vehicle for their hateful bits. Note that Aurenheimer is the guy who single handedly managed to drive a very large number of people away from Slashdot and who tends to come across as a man who relishes to watch the world burn.
Providing a service to such a character or not is the kind of decision a company should be allowed to make.
I'm not trying to make a moral judgement about Tor. I just feel it's important to acknowledge the best way to protect privacy is not always obvious and is rarely if ever simple.
It's an open secret -- in other words, not even a secret -- that Tor and various other darknet and overlay networks contain, among other kinds of material, content that has been driven underground because of the risks it presents to its promulgators on the aboveground net. Depictions of actual child sex abuse, one of the most widely condemned sorts of material in a way that's nearly universal across societies, has been present on Tor-reachable hidden services for years, and the Tor Project seldom writes about this; it's simply accepted as a risk of the style of technology, much to the chagrin and moral unease of people everwhere.
Clearly they are addressing a recent development about a particular website, with relevance to the United States and its current struggle that was brought to forefront in the past week. The Project sought to publicize their stance to leave no doubts, but was this not something that ought to have been abundantly clear to a sufficiently objective observer? Doesn't the fact that a US nonprofit tending to a piece of networking software decides to weigh in on the matter of a single hidden service currently in the spotlight reveal something troubling about the pressures of public opinion in the US today?
On a more serious note, Tor was meant to be used by people that want to say something that may run counter to the general, approved, discourse. That was a very ironic statement.
Talking on the internet and organizing legal, peaceful, rallies, is fine in my book.
The US really doesn't care about freedom of speech anymore, which is spreading to the internet, and everyone is giddy to deal the last nail in the coffin.
I don't have the right to punch a Nazi, but the law doesn't stop me from doing so. It may be a deterrent and I may get punished, but the law doesn't create a physically insurmountable barrier.
Actually, not being physically assaulted is a right, not the other way around. You can't just go around screaming "VIGILANTE JUSTICE!" just because someone you dislike got the shit beaten out of them, and then defend that by saying "It's my right to make you face the consequences".
By your own logic, somebody could literally torture you for posting this if they disagreed, and it would be okay because you're just facing the consequences.
In other words, you have the right to declare yourself a Nazi, but then you may become a target for people who punch Nazis. That's not an opinion or a belief, this actually happens.
We're also getting tripped up on assumptions. I didn't suggest that I support violence or hacking. I didn't suggest that violence or hacking is justified, let alone a legal right.
I was speculating that shows of resistance which escalate into unlawful action may be a result of groups which feel threatened but see no legal option to oppose that threat (actually, I didn't even say that much).
Then your statement is literally meaningless.
>In other words, you have the right to declare yourself a Nazi, but then you may become a target for people who punch Nazis.
Yes. Those people are fucking stupid, and telling people they have the right to beat the shit out of people they dislike is also fucking stupid. That logic is so fucked up, it would take several paragraphs to thoroughly explain why it's bad logic.
>We're also getting tripped up on assumptions. I didn't suggest that I support violence or hacking. I didn't suggest that violence or hacking is justified, let alone a legal right.
You literally said people have the right to get the shit kicked out of them, with the implication it's deserved. The actual literal statement you made is an argument used by antifa to attack people they dislike. If you're going to use statements made to defend violence, you need to understand people will assume you support the groups espousing said statements, for the same reason people chanting "Blood and soil" are called Nazis.
(Edit: Wording slightly changed to reflect point raised below.)
I mean, if you're going to be neutral, say it. Don't say you're against something, when you're not.
If they could, the whole idea wouldn't work.
The fact that Neo Nazis, Journalists and human rights activists all use the same service (though I suspect that all three of them are drowned out by copyright violation and illicit pornography) does not say much about the service itself, especially not when that service has been designed from the ground up to achieve that effect.
Cloudflare as a corporate entity with shareholders and customers is in an entirely different position than a not-for-profit entity such as the Tor project. Both are acting roughly as one would expect given their background.
Let's back up a second.
What's the mapping of online avatars on that site to human beings?
If it's 1:1 then I should continue reading Tor's statement.
1:1-times-N for any N other than 1 is quite unlikely so we can throw out that possibility.
1-times-N:1 for N = 10 or even N = 20 are likely and cheap. An echo chamber of ten racists doesn't warrant a response from Tor, while an echo chamber of hundreds might.
1:N:1 for N = 20+ is possible especially by state actors. A small group of paid scammers simulating activites of 1000+ racists is enough to cause noticeable social disruption.
So the next question is: does Tor devbase have a way to map medusa heads to torsos?
I think the answer is "no". Not only for Tor, but also Wall Street Journal, Breitbart News, The Guardian, and possibly even Reddit, Twitter, Snapchat, etc.
If I'm right about that, then I read Tor's statement as essentially eating the cost of having no way to effectively separate signal from noise and simply rolling up their sleeves and treating all noise as potential signal. That's as wasteful as it was in the 90s & early 2000s to simply eat the cost of reading everything in the email inbox and deleting the spam manually. But here it's more than loss of productivity-- its potentially confusing a large portion of reality with a simulation. And unlike the widespread cynicism that came with tv broadcast, people seem to have convinced themselves that social media and random sites/comment sections are an earnest and democratic reflection of some meaningful segment of the general population.
edit: formatting