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Comment by _heimdall | Hacker News Reader

This is the crux of every argument against free speech, no?

There is a fundamental trade off we have always had to make between safety and freedom. If you believe that privacy online is a freedom worth having, or if you believe one should be able to say whatever they want, you have to accept the bad with the good.

As soon as you start gating access by judging a person by what they're trying to do privately online, or what they're trying to say, you've thrown out that freedom and made it a privledge.

There's not even anything wrong with that if that's the world you would prefer to live in. Its important to know that's the tradeoff you're making though, and be prepared to accept the consequences if you one day find yourself running into new leadership that believes what you want to do online, or what you say, isn't worthy of the privilege.

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> Its important to know that's the tradeoff you're making though

Exactly. This is all I'm saying.

I don't have enough knowledge of Tor to make an argument that it does more harm than good or vice versa. But I do know that a lot of people on here are just as ignorant as I am but are quick to assume that Tor must be inherently good because it protects privacy.

As I said, if you look frankly at the risks and decide that the benefits are still worth it, that's a decision I'm comfortable with you making. But that requires looking very frankly at the risks, which most seem reluctant to do in favor of high-minded abstract discussions of the merits of freedom and privacy.

This subthread spawned from someone who helped facilitate a bomb threat through an exit node they were running, and that kind of concrete harm needs to be mentioned in any discussion of the merits of Tor.

And someone else pointed out that the IRA used to send bombs through the mail. Yet we are not debating shutting down the Royal Mail because of that (and rightly so).

There are governments out there who kill people who criticise them, usually journalists. We need those people to continue their work. We do not want a world in which all communication is government-approved.

> the IRA used to send bombs through the mail. Yet we are not debating shutting down the Royal Mail because of that (and rightly so).

As I said elsewhere, at least in the US there's an entire law enforcement agency whose sole job is tracking down people who use the postal service to commit crimes and hurt other people. I'm sure there's an equivalent process in the UK. Tor is specifically designed to make that impossible.

There's really no comparison.

> There are governments out there who kill people who criticise them, usually journalists. We need those people to continue their work. We do not want a world in which all communication is government-approved.

I agree, and it may well be that on the balance we come to the conclusion that Tor is worth it. All I'm asking is that we stop looking at the harms as an abstraction and the benefits as concrete.

OP facilitated a bomb threat but seems to have thought primarily about how unfair it was that law enforcement subpoenaed them rather than the complexity of the moral choice they made and its consequences.

OP facilitated a bomb threat in the same way that the postman who delivered an IRA bomb did.

The complaint seems to be really about how the people who are hunting for the actual bad guys are so incompetent that they're hassling people running Tor exit nodes. The basic misunderstanding of technology is leading to unjust outcomes (whatever you think of the moral choices of people running Tor nodes; they are incapable of helping the inquiries so should not be subjected to these incompetent fumblings).

If the government thinks that Tor is a bad thing, and that running an exit node is immoral then we have a system in place to deal with that: pass a law making it illegal. Letting incompetent authorities hassle people who choose to do this perfectly legal activity is not the answer.

This trade off concept is a popular belief but completely fictitious and dishonest.

The state is not fundamentally better than the people as a whole. They just have more focused resources.

More resources to brainwash their subjects about how their power is always such a great and wonderful thing and is only ever used for good, and definitely better than people exercising power themselves.

Oh and also much more resources to gas people to death in camps, starve them to death, blow them to bits (but always for completely good and justified reasons of course).

Complete crock of shit, it is.

I disagree. Centralizing power absolutely has the potential for providing more safety. Its up to those with the power to decide whether to provide it, and to whom they provide it.

I whole heartedly agree with your underlying argument that granting power to the state is never worth the trade off though.

Wasn’t the raid done in a democratic land? There is no gestapo in Germany in 2024, is there? Privacy is what terrorists love too. There needs to be a balance. Even guns need permits and psychological evaluation.

The goverment has just revoked your speech license. Please upstain from public talking to more than three people.

I really don't get how bomb threats can be considered "speech". Like, there is no benefit to society from allowing people to make bomb threats.

Be more precise in your thinking. This is not about bomb threats, this is about punishing people that provide a line of communication.

It is not a new concept that defendants of freedom of speech often have to protect scoundrels too. The argument doesn't change, it always has the same pattern and principle. And yes, it is advisable to err on the side of freedom, there is enough literature here to expand on that point.

Additionally the agencies that would demand these information are prone to break the law itself. So this isn't even a discussion about doing something just or not. This is purely a discussion about how much power you want the executive to have. Or in case of Germany, the often misdirected and overworked judicative branch.

Here's a different take:

Criminals and fraudsters will abuse pretty much every technology they can get their hands on. As a consequence, every service operator needs to do their part to prevent fraud and abuse. If you offer a service anonymously and indiscriminately, your service will be overrun by crooks, and you'll end up serving criminals.

The fact that your service could be used to defend free speech does not absolve you from your duty of monitoring the use of your service. If you realise your service is used for exchanging illegal content and bomb threats, it's your duty to do something against that, or stop providing the service.

> that provide a line of communication.

Except that line of communication puts your address on whatever it is sent by who-knows-who

A "perfect proxy" does that by design pretty much. Law enforcement can't know what was on that address until an inquiry

Freedoms and laws apart, that's the problem here

> Be more precise in your thinking. This is not about bomb threats, this is about punishing people that provide a line of communication.

Yeah, I used to think in good-or-bad, right-or-wrong, black-or-white terms too... Then I grew out of my teens.

This is about bomb threats.

The government are against free speech if you are criticising illegal things they are doing.

Germany certainly needs more liberty instead of raiding the home that called an official a penis.

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