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Comment by nkrisc | Hacker News Reader

You have to ask yourself if the good is worth the harm.

But the math on that looks like this.

The "really bad" people have no conscience. No qualms about compromising the device of some innocent victim and then using that as their "exit node" if Tor wasn't available. So if Tor doesn't exist, that's what they do, and that's worse. Because not only do the bad guys still get to be anonymous, now the owner of the compromised system takes the blame. Which is more likely to be someone less able than you to articulate what happened, and who has to claim they were hacked with perhaps scant evidence rather than being able to point to their IP address on the public list of Tor exit nodes. They also might not be in a country with due process. So what you're doing there isn't helping the bad guys, it's saving some of their innocent victims from being unjustly punished.

Meanwhile the "good guys" who use Tor do have a conscience, so they wouldn't do that to an innocent third party, and then without Tor they have nothing. So you'd be helping them too.

We shouldn’t have keys then. Really bad actors are going to force your door anyway. Let’s at least save the doors.

Come on, Tor main use is child pornography and drugs. If you think you’re helping oppressed journalists, it’s 99% false. You’re mostly enabling all sorts of criminal activities, from benign to major. Hosting a tor exit nod doesn’t make you a hero, quite the opposite actually.

> We shouldn’t have keys then. Really bad actors are going to force your door anyway. Let’s at least save the doors.

Locks aren't for the really bad people, who are in fact going to break down the door. They prevent crimes of convenience.

But Tor is the lock, and the crimes of convenience would be e.g. mass surveillance of the population, in the event that ordinary people don't have it. So it's not clear what you're arguing here. That everyone should use Tor?

> Tor main use is child pornography and drugs. If you think you’re helping oppressed journalists, it’s 99% false.

Start here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41507790

Add to this, the illegal stuff isn't accessed via exit nodes, which link into the ordinary internet. Those things use hidden services, which are internal to the network and don't use exit nodes.

But let's even explore the premise. Suppose a lot of the traffic is people trading in illegal materials. Well, that's not really a big problem; people do that stuff via several other existing channels and the societal cost of each instance of someone buying pot over the internet isn't very high. Whereas the societal benefit of one single whistleblower is massive. These things can change the lives of millions of people. So even if it's 99% contraband, the remaining 1% is ten million times as valuable.

I would use that argument if I were an oppressive government that was troubled by journalists using Tor to expose me. It's only 1% right? Think of the children.

Quoth Fidel Castro: ¿Armas para qué? (What do you need guns for?)

Guess what he did after he took the people's guns

If your weapon against oppression is 99% enabling child pornography to thrive, I fail to see what overall good you are making. How many lives ruined for how many articles read?

You try to paint me as a "purist" that would allow the world to fall into the worst abusive governments just to save 1 child, but if you look at it honestly, you are at least as purist as me, because you would enable arbitrary amount of crimes just to save 1 journalist.

Assuming my 99% is accurate, the numbers are really not in your favor, plus journalists are grown adults that make their own choices, while children don’t chose to risk being abused, filmed and exposed online.

Even if we assume 99% of Tor is CP, that doesn't mean blocking Tor will remove 99% of CP. In fact, it probably will have no impact, as criminals will just use other methods, as they are well funded unlike oppressed journalists.

Surely there are also other ways for whistleblowers/journalists to communicate secrets. And why do you assume the random child porn creator/enjoyer is well funded? This kind of crime is more about availability and lack of consequences than money. Tor makes it invisible as no one will ever admit to it, but it's still easily available to anyone, with no consequences. Why are you so convinced that going after it is necessarily useless, necessarily harmful and necessarily wrong? I can't help but feel that it's a principled position, and that no amount of harm done would justify making it law-enforceable to you. How much lawlessness should we accept in exchange for how much whistleblowing? Any amount vs the slightest act doesn't sound like a good balance to me.

> Even if we assume 99% of Tor is CP, that doesn't mean blocking Tor will remove 99% of CP.

Yeah, sure. But now you're talking statistics, which is rather irrelevant in a discussion on principles.

It's true that keys are mostly there to deal with minor bad actors and don't do much against determined adversaries. They are however not much of an obstacle to authorized persons which is why we use them.

You also may notice that in most civilized countries we do stop at somewhat weak keys and glass windows and don't bother with fortifying each house to withstand a full on assault from a criminal organization. That's because this will have a very high cost and we are better off dealing with criminals in other ways so this lack of protection is not a real concern.

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