On Fri, Jan 17, 2014 at 01:26:04PM -0800, Erik Moeller wrote:
The Board or global community could decide that protecting users' right to anonymity is more important than having abuse prevention tools relying on IP disclosure, but in the absence of such a Board-level decision or community-wide vote, I don't think the situation relative to Tor users will change. My personal view is that we should transition away from tools relying on IP disclosure, given the global state of Internet surveillance and censorship which makes tools like Tor necessary.
Hear, hear. I couldn't agree more.
My own view:
This matter isn't about dissidents in oppressive regimes or suspected criminals. It never was, but it has become especially apparent to everyone this summer.
The whole world -literally everyone- is being constantly surveilled and our communications recorded for decades to come. Everyone is a suspect and everyone has a file. We'll never be sure again, for example, that actions that we perform today, as innocent as they are now -like a Wikipedia edit- won't be used against us in 5 or 10 years to link us with a crime or group.
All access & edits to Wikipedia being monitored isn't some paranoid theory anymore, we can be more than sure of it. Tor is one of the very few ways to resist to this pervasive surveillance and work around the panopticon of modern states. We *must* find a way to support it as a first-class citizen, for exactly the same reasons Wikipedia has been protective of users' privacy and has a stringent privacy policy.
(I was at 30C3; I got a bazillion complaints from numerous people about this every time I mentioned my affiliation, even before Jake's talk)
Regards, Faidon