Confidence2010: Anonymity, Privacy, and Circumvention with Tor in the Real World
By Jacob Applebaum (@ioerror)
Jacob had to start his talk without slides due to technical difficulties, but he did alright.
First off he talks about some treats against our privacy. Political plans for nation wide key escrow and wide scale data retention are popping up all over the western world.
The Australian web filter against child pornography has proven that these kind of filters don’t work. Before it was deployed nation wide the filter already succeeded in creeping its scope by blocking a dentists web site.
Jacob, personally, specifically cares about cases where Tor is used to censor people.Censorship will never serve humanity and in fact humanity becomes a slave to the truth of its sensors.
If you want to stop child pornographers, you don’t do it by stopping them from publishing the pornography, but you let them publish the pictures and use traditional police work to track them down and help the victims and punish the wrong-doers.
So who really uses Tor:
- Bloggers and students
- Journalists and their audience members
- IT professionals
- Human rights activists and likely whistleblowers
So how can you help?
You can help by setting up a Tor node yourself. Go to http://www.torproject.org/ and download the software. The documentation pages give you enough informatio to start your own Tor node.
Why should you help?
In Iran people who attended a demonstration and SMS-ed or email-ed from the demonstration get arrested one or two days after the demonstration. Providing a way to communicate privately and openly to people like these is really important.
Maybe the fact that I have been able to hide the fact that I visited a Wikipedia page about a heart disease in my family may help prevent that I won’t be able to get healthcare insurance in the future.
An additional danger of country wide filters is that these machines are often overloaded and use very old versions of Squid. Posing a risk to anybody using internet in those countries.
Tor is not a solution to the censoring problem, it’s just a tool to circumvent censorship. To ban out censorship a social change needs to happen.