80 Percent of Tor Traffic Is Not Child Porn
wired.com
wired.com
Saying this is just using false information to sway the public, and looking to badge things that are just tools as inherently evil tools, or tools only used for evil.
Disclaiming the lie is a good step - but I'd like to see the rebuttal coming from a more mainstream media source. Wired writing this article is preaching to the choir.
They spread fud and fearmonger the general population into believing something must be done to prevent all of this "law enforcement circumventing" encryption and anonymity (aka. privacy)...
You know... because only criminals use encryption and anonymity tools. Only criminals have anything to hide; that they don't want other individuals and criminals (and government) to obtain.
Forget all the good and valid reasons for encryption and privacy! Like protecting your medical records... protecting your financial records... your private correspondence... or the very ability to enter your credit card information on a website and trust it can't be MITM'ed. Only criminals want any of that.
It's rubbish to say the least.
I wish someone in Congress would ask and investigate the DOJ and FBI on how much of the kiddie porn is actually generated and associated with and originating from DOJ and FBI operatives who are trying to attract those who would want that kind of thing. I know it's not 0.
Who gets to set standards on the Internet? If the least-permissive standard won for each category, the Internet would be boring.
Most damaging, I think, is the ability of governments to keep secrets - this is the most destructive force in governance, I believe, and we the people have to realize that the right for governments in power to keep secrets is a form of violence upon the body politic. But unless we yank the chain by revoking that power on occasion, I think it gets abused all too well.
In fact, I think the only valid response to the governments new calls to remove public encryption is to demand that the right for governments to keep secrets be revoked, by the people. Let us answer their call for intrusion into our private lives with the response: no more secrets in government then, either!
Hear, hear! But propose that the government be open and transparent and people complain about all of our military secrets being public. Fucking good, that's the point.
Which in itself is illegal.
So whilst Andy Greenberg's article is correct, it's correct in a nitpicky technical sense that isn't going to have any political impact as an argument. Tor has chosen to support hidden services very strongly, so the fact that it's a relatively small amount of their total traffic doesn't matter much.
The Tor project needs to take this kind of thing seriously. Alarm bells should be ringing. They are getting (apparently credible?) tipoffs about plans to seize directory authorities. Relays actually are getting seized. DoJ officials are publicly saying they perceive Tor as being dominated by crime. Meanwhile they are doubling down and making blog posts that describe police operations as "attacks". This has the feeling of a slow motion train wreck in the making.
Hidden services have a wide range of legitimate, valuable uses, including: https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/01/28/how-to-leak-to...
Is there a more reasonable way to describe "police operations" whose goal is to disable portions of or function of a network?
For reasonable, common definitions of "attack," seeking to disable something or cause it to malfunction is an attack against that thing.
Edit in case it's changed: The title is, "80 Percent of Tor Traffic Is Not Child Porn."
`/department-justice-80-percent-tor-traffic-child-porn`
I hope that at some point John Q Public realizes that digital privacy and free flow of information are more akin to advancing society scientifically and spiritually much more so than terrorism, child porn, human/drug/weapon trafficking, et al.
After the Snowden revelations it was quite apparent that the average citizen would gladly exchange a lot of privacy in order to fight an enemy that doesn't exist.
I hope we can stop going to war with ghosts and focus on moving society forward. An open internet can be a great tool for this.
The trouble is, there is no way to accurately measure this factor, nor is there any recognition of it - because using the Internet for free and open, honest communication, is the majority case. Unless we can come up with some way of acknowledging the good, and really getting the good counted in a way that is statistically significant in the discussion, this piece of the pie is going to be impinged upon by the loud, attention-getting, criminal activities.
But this circumstance is not unique to the Internet - it has been true of all media, since the days of Gutenberg. The good rarely gets attention; only the violence, the hatred, the terrorism gets real attention in our world. Nobody turns on the news to hear what good has happened in the world - for some reason, this is not interesting to the majority.
If there were only some way to change this situation, we would see some light at the end of the tunnel - I suppose acknowledgement of the positive in the world does happen. But we need to get off our junky fix for the disorder and chaos in this communication age, and figure out ways to measure the good that open, honest, and most importantly free communication brings to the world. We need a metric that makes sense in light of the death statistics, the crime rate, and so on ...
Wishful thinking. Way things are going we will lose that war soon.
This is also a bogus number. An estimated 80% of Tor hidden service directory lookups are for those sites. Long-lived connections only make one lookup, and sites that people check multiple times in one session only get looked up periodically. The ones that are looked up the most often are the ones where people open Tor, visit the site, then close Tor. This does not correlate with volume of Tor traffic at all.
Almost everyone in the U.S. drives and everyone who drives hates getting traffic tickets. I thought allegations/criticisms like these only really worked when you could separate the users into some group identified as "other".
The obvious conclusion being that the feature must be removed (obvious to a certain Orange country sheriff at least). http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2015/01/28/382013185/off...
It does sound silly, as cops are not hard to find. I seriously doubt a would be cop killer needs to consult an app when looking for a cop to kill.
IIRC they even have a common phone number to summon them.
I don't know if that makes really sense but it's much less outrageous than what the OP implied.
Are you trying to get a government job as propagandist and fear-monger?
From the article: Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck complained in a letter to Google's chief executive on Dec. 30 that Waze could be "misused by those with criminal intent to endanger police officers and the community."
What's good for the goose is good for the gander.
If the DoJ could do that, they would necessarily have the ability to track and capture the CP-traffickers without bothering to "inform" the news media that such people are crawling all over Tor, in your Internet pipes, coming to get your children.
CP is such a universally reviled thing that whenever someone brings it up in an unrelated argument, I automatically suspect that they are losing it, they know it, and they are falling back to rhetoric. It is the "won't someone please think of the children" appeal to emotion, turned up to 11.
Granted your data will be biased towards unencrypted traffic, but you should get a small picture of whats going on. Plain jane http and ftp traffic should be sniffable.
The "small picture" you would get, is very well probably the 80% we are talking about, e.g., 80% of all traffic that is associated with kiddie porn and is also unencrypted because the perpetrators are unsophisticated is actual kiddie porn traffic, which says nothing whatsoever about the overall amount of traffic that is kiddie porn. On top of that, what are we talking about here? What is this definition of o kiddie porn? Does that number include subjects that "appear" to be underage? If I know anything, I know that the government will skew numbers to fool others and even themselves; because that's how you get money and how you build your little fiefdom.
Also, governments and media are notorious for giving out numbers that are nearly impossible to find out anyway.
The Cold War example that comes to mind is Partisan Review, a broadly left-oriented journal that published Susan Sontag's "Notes on Camp" and Clement Greenberg's highly influential art essays (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partisan_Review#Funding_by_the_...), which (it was later found) accepted multiple donations from CIA fronts.
As time went on, some viewed these donations as a tool these agencies found to bolster the intellectual stature of the "New York School" of heroic AbEx painters versus their Soviet counterparts (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstract_expressionism#Abstract...).
I tried to google it but all I get is useless soundbites and fear-mongering, all over the mainstream media, with everyone linking back to Wired.com.
No one links to the actual study or to any evidence to support the claim.
Shame on you Wired.
His personal site: https://ghowen.me/other.html
And a direct link to the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZdeRmlj8Gw
I'd imagine he'll publish a full write-up soon but the talk was only a few weeks ago so il not surprised it's not out yet.
Also, this is definitely one of the reason I can't see myself using Tor. If I were to be a proxy for something like this :(
The most important distinction is between "Dark Web" and "Tor". A reader not intimately familiar with Tor could easily assume that those are used interchangeably.
Why would US's judgement against child porn be better than <insert a country>'s judgement on journalism.