I disagree with this. Free speech is in essence, absolute. As soon as you start making allowances and exceptions the entire subject is moot.
The only threshold should be calls for violence or murder. AFAIK the Mullvad founder hasn't crossed this line.
Did all Tor developers, users and exit-node administrators get a vote in this? Or is it a small minority who decides this course?
Free speech also includes speech you may not agree with and just because you accept someone's (or some company's) donations doesn't mean you're "associated" with them.
> Members of the Tor community have asked us to explain how continued collaboration with Mullvad fits with the Tor Project's human rights mission.
> Our decision followed a thorough due diligence process that involved extensive discussions with community members, staff, and the board, a staff survey, and detailed financial analysis and scenario planning.
Tor is not a democracy and doesn't purport to be. The article outlines the due diligence they have already done, and they're writing this as notice to their community, in response to questions from it.
Privacy, surveillance, and censorship are political debates. According to your logic, Tor shouldn't choose sides on those either.
I don't understand this view. Tor is inherently a political project.
So they can be political in more things and actually when they make an honest public statement we should be happy since we know clearly what's their standing on important issues of today. I think that should be important to all of us.
The best way to fulfill their mission is to advocate for protecting all rights.
* Focus on more public surveillance
* Leverage the full intelligence capabilities of the state to detect and identify individuals involved in or associated with organized crime.
* Law enforcement authorities have the right to employ wiretapping, surveillance, extensive undercover operations, and preventive detention in cases involving an individual flagged as active within or around [organized crime].
* proactively blacklist and red-flag criminals, preventing them and their relatives from committing crimes altogether, restricting their ability to contact other criminals, access their assets and transfer/receive money (and a bunch of other things)
Does this seem compatible woth TOR and it's values?
(hilauriously the same party, as they're populists, are completely against Chat Control)
That mission might be political - but the politics follow from the mission not the other way around.
The mission I’d personally like out of a product that fits Tor’s space is: the ability to unconditionally communicate securely and privately over the public Internet.
Saying that mission is inherently political, sure, you’re going to exclude people who disagree with the mission. That’s kinda the point.
But saying that the narrow politics of that mission means the organization should be broadened to take additional political stances that would exclude people who otherwise would participate in advancing the mission?
I don’t know how that follows.
> But saying that the narrow politics of that mission means the organization should be broadened to take additional political stances that would exclude people who otherwise would participate in advancing the mission?
They're not really excluding anyone. If you read the blogpost, they're not even stopping their technological partnership. They are just stopping co-branding themselves to avoid being seen as directly associated with Mullvad. That doesn't exclude anyone. Co-branding is a position of added trust on top of the baseline of being aligned with anyone who shares your views, isn't it expected that an organization might be pickier if it has to sign under another organization's brand?
> Did all Tor developers, users and exit-node administrators get a vote in this? Or is it a small minority who decides this course?
This is addressed in the announcement.
> Free speech also includes speech you may not agree with and just because you accept someone's (or some company's) donations doesn't mean you're "associated" with them.
Tor didn't stop taking the donations nor did they stop cooperating with Mullvad on development.
What they did is pause "joint promotional activity" and review the language of what they had published about Mullvad to avoid implying an endorsement or alignment of values.
What problem do you have with that? This seems like precisely the avoidance of side taking that you are advocating.
Developers are not machines. They are human as well and can have stances. That’s natural.
This is esp. true for Tor. They are providing privacy services to begin with.
When big players don't choose sides, it doesn't mean they actually dont support a side, it means we don't know or they wanna hide it.
So my point is we might not agree with Tor at this, but I know, I guess to a reasonable degree, now what Tor stands for, and that is rare today.
Also lets not forget that, at least for many people, Tor is a heavy mission driven project. So what it chooses matters to people that worry about big issues of our generation.
Put 'violence and murder' next to 'threatening human rights and freedoms' and the former is not a great distance from the later. (having said that, the latter probably has a lot of 'definition argument' within it).
The principles of free speech can be held by individuals and organizations, even thought they don't have as much power as the government.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it" doesn't necessarily need to be scoped to just "... from government interference".
Case in point: legal or not, people cancelling speeches and people, shutting down legal speech, do NOT stand for freedom of speech. In fact, I've often heard them say "I don't particularly care about freedom of speech", verbatim,
It's tiring to see people make the case that because the government was not involved, that it's by definition completely unrelated to free speech. Like, you clearly know that's not the case, from this follow up.
Of course the right to free speech does not extend to compelled speech, as you say.
ACLU defended the Nazis because they support free speech. But "free speech" of course doesn't compel them to. But clearly if they had chosen not to, they'd show they care less about free speech than they say.
Like the ACLU of today, who have said that they'll only defend speech they agree with, or something to than effect. Well, morally, do you actually have that value anymore?
Except that heckling and shouting down a speaker is speech too. And thus your argument is incoherent: do you want to restrict speech that impedes other's freedom of speech? If no, then the hecklers must be given free rein; if yes, then the case can be made to restrict racists' freedom of speech as they try to restrict some other people's freedoms, including the latter's freedom of speech.
How about industrial megaphones?
Your free speech only extends so far as it doesn't prevent, prior restraint, someone else's free speech.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
What you just said is the antithesis to free speech.
No. If the goal of your so called speech is to physically stop someone else's right to free speech, then you are just a thug and don't actually hold this value.
And like I said, many people who do this prevention of free speech admin it explicitly in so many words. They do not care about free speech.
> "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
It's a great slogan and a terrific ideal. But actually think it through, in real world situations, and you end up with so many edge cases.
Whether done by the government or by an angry mob is a legal difference, but not a principled or moral difference.
You can't be in favour of free speech and also prior speech restraint, "as long as it's not by the government". And as I've said, to be fair to many of those who do it, they admit that they don't care about free speech. And it's true. Their actions are consistent with their claim.
Both heckler and speaker have free speech rights. The speaker did not come there to prevent the heckler's speech. But if the heckler did come to prevent the rights of the speaker, then they are not merely heckling.
That is a fundamental difference.
Your bullhorn preventing not just the speaker from speaking, but the listeners from being able to reject the speaker's message, is just, well, against freedom of speech and freedom in general.
> But actually think it through, in real world situations, and you end up with so many edge cases.
Am I'm sad that people will give up their values for inconveniences. Then they're not your values, just your hobbies, at best.
You may as well be against torture, "except when it's a bad guy".
Edit: or what do you think of this: You can report this comment to HN, hoping that it gets deleted. Would you claim that this is you exercising free speech, or fighting free speech? I would say it'd clearly be the latter. That is, if you did it not because you found my comment against HN policies, but because you disagree and therefore wish that my argument never be heard by anyone?
You presumably also think that it'd be free speech to deny your math class hearing the math professor by non-stop screaming?
Nobody is going to stop my free speech about how integrals are not real because infinities don't exist or something. But that's not the same as giving me the right to shut down all speech about it but mine. So yes, I will be taken out of the classroom specifically set up to hear about integrals, for that.
Can religious people prevent your whole school from learning about evolution? That would literally fall under, in your words, a university ordering its students "we will invite speaker A to come talk to you on the big stage, and you have to sit there and listen". Not forced at gunpoint, but at grade-point.
Can I forever shut down a theology department by showing up every day with a bullhorn? Is that free speech?
Would it be free speech to give literally everyone a heckler's veto?
I really think you need to refine your question.
you disagree with freedom of association?
Insults should not be allowed. But then, the free speech is threatened. What do you do?
Posting a message asking people to set fire to someone’s house, also not ok.
Where do _you_ set the limit?
Your point is moot. If speech is entirely absolute until violence is threatened, some of the most destructive crimes in modern society would become entirely legal.
Even under U.S. law, free speech has well-defined limits.
Not very absolute though, and why are calls for violence somehow different from other icky things like sharing AI-generated nude images or selling people dangerous weapons?
I respect the moxie of the free speech absolutists and I'm glad there are some of them in the world. I personally tend to think things are a bit more complex than that, but if you're going to be an absolutist, then be an absolutist and allow all speech, including calls for violence.
You're free to say whatever messed up stuff you want to me, and I'm free to tell you to "Go F*CK Yourself"
There are other universal exceptions which I'm guessing you are forgetting:
* Slander
* Fraud
* Treason (actual treason - e.g., passing info
to the enemy in a war for survival)
Unfortunately, real life always has grey areas; no simple algorithm can address it.
At the end of the day, you either engage with the speech and argue against the idea, or you appeal to authority and hope it is worthy of your trust. Personally, I'm a little too jaded for that.
It's not always simple; it's not always perfect; but practically we do it all the time as a matter of course. Everyone makes decisions like that every day; every authority makes those decisions - managers at work, politicians in hearings; the public does it listening to political messages, parents do it listening to teenagers explaining where they were all night ...