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Comment by heavyset_go | Hacker News Reader

> We dont yet life in the police state where everyone's political opinions need to be hidden in dark networks.

Millions of people are in places where acknowledging that they want abortions[1] or miscarried[2] can pique the state's interest, along with people who are trans[3] or have trans kids[4].

We have police using web searches to prosecute women for abortion[1], we have states compiling lists of transgender individuals[3] and we have parents being investigated by the state because their kids were open about being trans[4].

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/07/03/abortio...

[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-59214544

[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/12/14/texas-trans...

[4] https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/09/23/texas-tra...

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That is what Tor is for. If all you need is protection from authorities, Tor is enough. Freenet is content-focused, designed so that not even the original uploader can ever remove popular content. Tor protects people and speech from the police. Freenet protects files from everybody.

That’s not quite true.

Freenet protects communication — content in flow. Somewhat larger files that are not accessed automatically disappear from Freenet after a short while.

Tor protects your connection to another computer.

The stated usecases are excellent examples for usage of Freenet: information for transgender people or about abortions. Even accessing such information can get you in danger nowadays.

And a site accessed via Tor can more easily be compromised (to get your identity by tracking information from your OS or similar) or taken down (so the information is gone).

Plenty of pertinent information exists as documents, like lists of abortion providers or how/where to get hormone replacement therapy, etc. Freenet can be used for such content and would save a person from having related search queries and sites in their normal web history/traffic that can later be used against them.

Well.. Tor can create trouble for you as well, or at least it did for me. I used to sometimes go through Tor to visit competitors' websites when I used my work computer, just because I didn't want to leave a trail of my company's domain in the competitor's logs. That was quite innocent I thought. Then my sysadmin informed me that the national security monitor (or whatever it was called), which my company was connected to, got an alarm on that. Turns out they had a trigger on Tor connections because they considered it as something used for malicious purposes. It's even triggered if a passive Tor application is running on a mobile device connected to the wifi guest network, b/c it may sometimes probe a node even if not in use. So, uninstall it is. If it's that easy to monitor that someone is using Tor I don't see how it can actually be used by anyone anywhere, where it matters (for something more important than what I used it for).

Yes Tor usage by default is trivial to detect because the list of Tor nodes your client connects to is public. The EFF has a nice interactive graphic that shows what different actors see if you use Tor [0] You can make that harder to detect by using a bridge. https://bridges.torproject.org/

[0] https://www.eff.org/de/pages/tor-and-https

> national security monitor

What is this? Are governments mandating that corporations install government monitoring modules in their networks?

Yes. Various countries, including the US, mandate isps install equipment for easy wire tapping. Google "CALEA". There is a whole consultant industry supporting compliance with such laws.

Came here to post about this seconds after you did.

Not only CALEA, but telecoms, ISPs, and other providers work hand in hand with governments who request data, whether those requests are via NSLs, warrants, subpoenas, court orders or just government employees asking nicely for the data.

Many companies, including for example Apple who is open about this, are happy to hand over private information via simple requests from law enforcement that they are not legally bound to respond to like they are with warrants or subpoenas.

I'd assume by scratching law enforcement's back, the government scratches compliant companies' backs, as well, considering the contracts they get and favorable treatment they get from regulators.

That’s why we need to make it the default that people use Tor whenever they search for anything connected to health or politics — topics that others might want to discriminate against you on.

Women looking for abortions in the US just learned the hard way why this is an essential practice.

Recommended watching: The NSA surveillance doesn’t scale — Constanze Kurz at Euro Python 2014: https://archive.org/details/EuroPython_2014_kSFzmDYc

I was under the impression that law enforcement has established a large number of Tor exit nodes, allowing them to unravel the onion (so to speak).

Exit nodes would let them decrypt plaintext network traffic coming out of the exit node, but if they controlled some of the entrance and relay nodes, too, the chances of being able to deanonymize traffic increases.

Given that Tor is a US government creation, I'd assume they'd find value in controlling as many different nodes as they can in order to deanonymize traffic. Tor only has/had value to them as a way for government agents to communicate clandestinely in other jurisdictions.

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