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Comment by DeusExMachina | Hacker News Reader

I find curious that they first state this:

"As stated in our terms of service and privacy policy our service is not to be used for illegal activity, and as a legitimate company we will cooperate with law enforcement if we receive a court order"

And then this:

"In 2005 we setup HMA primarily as a way to bypass censorship of the world-wide-web whether this be on a government or a corporate/localized scale."

If censorship is government driven, it means that the law prohibits you to see some things. If you still do it, you get arrested because you are breaking the law. This is an illegal activity and they should cooperate with law enforcement, as stated in the first point.

So, how do they decide what is illegal but permitted and what is not? If they allow some illegal behavior and not some other, they are actually judging the morality of an act, and not if it respect laws.

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"Illegal" only has meaning within the context of a jurisdiction. Compare the rules on shooting unarmed burglars in California vs. Texas, for example.

The only reasonable way to read the article is to understand that "illegal" is shorthand for "Illegal in my jurisdiction, and in jurisdictions with enough power to get local law enforcement to turn the screws on me." It is simply impossible to follow all laws written by all countries; what is prohibited by one country may be mandatory in another.

No ISP in America is going to care if you post what would be protected speech in America from China where it may be illegal. From the point of view of the American courts, breaking that Chinese law is actually a public service; Here, the right to say bad things about our government is protected by our highest laws.

So yeah, I see no contradiction. The company is trying to obey laws that apply to them, and allowing customers to break laws that are outside of their jurisdiction.

I guess to them "censorship" is something only other countries do, not their own. I notice a lot of companies, and even the Government itself, want to fight against censorship in other countries, but when it happens in US, they're more than happy to comply, and sometimes they do it with just one phone call, like in Amazon or Paypal's case with Wikileaks.

I came in here to ask exactly that. They explicitly "forbid" illegal activity and then immediately promote their service as a way of breaking other countries' laws.

Exactly - I think they're a bit confused in their language. When HMA say:

"our VPN service and VPN services in general are not designed to be used to commit illegal activity"

...what they actually mean is:

"...not designed to be used to commit illegal activity in the USA"

Clearly one of their main selling points is the ability to circumvent censorship in countries where that's a problem. For better or for worse, trying to get around such restrictions can very well be illegal.

Of course, I'm not saying trying to get round oppressive censorship is a bad thing. Of course it's not - but HMA don't seem to acknowledge the hypocrisy of on the one hand saying "use our service to get around your government's laws" whilst on the other saying "but don't do any illegal activity!".

The real reason HMA have that attitude is that being based in the US they have everything to fear from US government action. This is the same reason online poker sites actively and aggressively block US players - because chances are at some point in the future you're going to do business in the US, and you don't want it coming back to bite you in the ass.

Similarly, why should HMA care about China or Iran getting upset at their service? But it's much more inconvenient if the FBI starts poking around, because they're based in the USA (I think).

We are not based in the US, we are a UK company, and operate using UK law only.

The simple answer is that if a vendor provides a technology that can be used to facilitate crime, that vendor emphasizes that they made the technology for some nominally lawful purpose. The record companies asserted that cassette tapes were designed to infringe copyright, the manufacturers stressed that they recorded what-ever and there were lots of non-infringing uses for them. Plausible deniability as a stategy perhaps.

That's not the answer.

DeusEx's question boils down to, ``why does the company claim to serve law-breakers (here: citizens breaking censorship), but as soon as law enforcement knocked on their doors, they gave all the info away''. Which is a fair question to ask.

Somehow, the company claims to serve only ethical law breakers, and they want do the judging on ethics.

I read it that Deuce set up a strawman : "If censorship is government driven, it means that the law prohibits you to see some things. If you still do it, you get arrested because you are breaking the law. This is an illegal activity and they should cooperate with law enforcement, as stated in the first point."

The fallacy here is embedded in the amphiboly that 'government' in the first part is the same 'legal basis' in the second part. There is no law in the US about getting around Chinese censorship, nor does skirting the web nanny protections of a high school rise to the level of law breaking, so much as terms of service breaking (which is a civil matter).

HMA can, and does, claim they have legitimate uses. In order for them to be tolerated by 'law enforcement' they must have such uses otherwise they are simply hunted down like any other criminal activity.

But they also have to cooperate with the authorities when it is brought to their attention or face becoming tainted by illegal use of their service. Another good example of this is BitTorrent right? They have a service which some people use to infringe copyright but the service isn't about that, its a "general purpose peer to peer data distribution engine."

Always interesting things to see what HN downvotes.

If censorship is government driven, it means that the law prohibits you to see some things

I don't think that's strictly true. Governments exert themselves in a number of ways that amount to 'soft censorship', and it is often neither illegal nor very difficult to circumvent these measures. They just want to make it inconvenient, and create an appearance of distance/disapproval. Politics rewards such hypocrisy.

For example, content filters on government-workplace or government-accomodation internet access. They may not really care if you tunnel around them – it's rarely illegal – they just want to make sure there's no appearance they condone the activity.

Even things like the national internet blacklists can fall into this category. They might require ISPs to block certain direct routes to disfavored sites, making access inconvenient. But the legal mandate is not to block all access via all means, and if you figure out how to access the target sites, you may not have broken any law (depending on what content you then copy/disseminate yourself).

This terms of service page is hard to find. Earlier this day I could not find it, but it was quoted in some article.

Now I have been successful: I have found a link to a terms of service page from the HTML sitemap page, it is here:

hidemyass.com/proxy/tos/

There is this statement:

"We reserve the right to cooperate with law enforcement agencies who are investigating criminal activities from abusive web proxy users."

I don't know what else a company can say than we choose to comply with court orders rather than face the consequence of not complying. The comment about bypassing censorship doesn't seem to have any value other than to placate users of the service.

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