It's kind of obnoxious that they assume everyone already knows the details of whatever controversy this is, and don't even provide a link to any explanation.
So what's the controversy?
Modern democracy is based on the separation of powers and, in the vast majority of countries, a constitution or charter(s) that can't be overturned by a simple majority vote. For example, a party can't suspend Habeas Corpus on a whim, even if said party won the presidency, the Congress and the Senate.
But just ask the Supreme Court who carved an exception for the FED and not other government agencies...
Why would this be far fetched? Many civilized countries, including the U.S., have similar policies.
Hungary's Orban had been in power for 16 years and if he'd won the election it would've been impossible to ever remove him.
Smart phones and social media have impacted culture most places far more than a few immigrants ever could - folks should spend more time worrying about those and less scapegoating of immigrants
This phrase is problematic and dangerous:
A country doesn't want anything; it's not a person. People use this phrasing to claim some authority (always for what that individual wants, of course) over others who disagree - 'the country wants, and I speak for the country'.
More importantly, humans have fundamental individual rights, including freedom - again, not countries but individuals. The rights are no less because some other people don't like the individual - immunity to the majority's desires almost defines rights in a practical sense; otherwise they aren't generally needed. You can't force people to leave or to do anything else because you don't like them.
It's dangerous because it's often used to violate rights and rationalize cruelties.
I know the word is used in cases where it’s hyperbole or just not accurate but there in fact people where the term racist is perfectly applicable.
And trying to cover blatant racism with justifications like "tolerance of cultural and ethnic diversity" is cowardly. Just say you judge people who are different than you and are willing to break fundamental promises in order to make them go away.
100%. I don't think that's happening in the USA today. There are grumblings in the far right red corners about the possibility, though.
> trying to cover blatant racism with justifications like "tolerance of cultural and ethnic diversity" is cowardly. Just say you judge people who are different than you and are willing to break fundamental promises in order to make them go away.
Are you accusing me of this? I assume you're not, but I'm not entirely sure what your angle is.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
I have yet to meet a free speech absolutist who was actually absolutist. At best they still struggle with violent speech and at worst they buy out a large social media platform and start censoring shit they don’t like.
> you have to draw a line somewhere.
So the entire subject is now moot, I gather.
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 ...
Double think.
Neat idea, but as usual, the real world is more complex than any one idea.
I understand that TOR is big and professional and all, but why does this read like a press statement of every tech corp under the sun? Do we have to talk like this?
Because.. looking at the whole.. uh.. stuff going on in US politics, I'm kinda doubtful. There are a lot of real and big problems going on right now that far outweigh choice of specific tone and words I'd say.
I mean. Their choice and all, but it comes with the trade-off of being massively alienating, and I'd argue that the cost benefit calculation of that might have to be redone, taking the current state of the world into account.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50021066
So.. idk? I think they might not care that much? In fact, they might like the people the Tor project is (rightfully (if done genuinely)) (pretending to) distance themselves from.
And whatever you do to please these "some", they will never be satisfied and just jump on to the next hate bandwagon the moment you give in to their demands. You never benefit from listening to these online activists, who already hate you and already don't use your product. Even more so when it's a non-profit product.
Mullvad browser is my favorite browser, and it's tor browser minus connection to tor.
I think this is a good rule of thumb: "If a company invests so much money in advertising over the long term and promotes its products so aggressively, the product must be subpar."
It's sad to see the backslide. In the olden days free speech absolutists would defend all speech short of fires in the cinema. Nowadays it has to be compatible with their brand of political correctness else they will tar and brush you or stay conspicuously silent.
You see the same backsliding in the Electronic Frontier Foundation and other non profits. They are a lot more neoliberal now than liberal. Interests over values.
One can publicly declare a speaker to be a wrongheaded pig that all decent people should ignore, but that's a wholly different thing from ensuring that said pig is unable to utter its wrongheaded ideas in public.
Free speech advocates support the right of everyone to set up a stall in the marketplace of ideas, but don't have to support every idea that sets up a stall.
A publisher of gay erotica might support free speech, and find themselves alongside revolutionary communists, hitler-heiling nazis and radical islamists distributing bomb-making manuals - but the groups aren't allies or friends outside of that.
characterized as left-wing, right-wing, populist, nationalist, and conservative
and:
Ideology: Populism, Swedish nationalism, Left-conservatism, Anti-corruption, Anti-establishment, Anti-immigration
Political position: Syncretic
So basically everyone can (dis)like it for some reason...
Like the issue of the grooming gangs in the UK
remind me what the home office said about which ethnicity “group-based child sexual exploitation offenders” are most commonly?
As of June 2025, there were 1,731 foreign sex offenders in prison, making up 10.6% of all prisoners convicted of sexual offences.
one can't establish a relationship between ethnicity and criminality anyway. The determinant variables are socio-economic.
Europe has this absurdist political compass that calls any anti-immigration party "far-right", even when their official party platform is center-left or far-left in every single other respect (like Örebro's current platform of substantial expansions of social welfare program funding). Same is true in France, where you have a party with far-left socialist economics and anti-immigration sentiment that is bucketed as "far-right".
We know what ethnic-cleansing looks like, and the horrors it both requires to do and eventually causes.
"Government goodies, but just for people like us" is very much compatible with far-right governance.
ICE has deported thousands of white people under the current administration, for instance. Their removal operations are indiscriminate, not racial. Several white people (some from Canada, some from the UK, some from Ireland) have made headline news after getting picked up by ICE ERO.
The rest is a large pile of missing the point, and bringing up things I did not say. I did not say any one was doing it. I said people were calling for it.
For the leaders of the Örebro Party in particular, Wikipedia suffices: > In a podcast segment about second generation immigrants involved in organised crime Allard stated "They will also be forced to leave, even if they are born in Sweden, because they have no natural connection to Sweden. They are not Swedish. They have not been interested in becoming Swedish."
(I am aware that Sweden is _Jus sanguinis_; it is entirely possible that second generation immigrants don't have citizenship; that merely makes it legal. And he does not explicitly make even that limiting argument.)
Note too that ethnicity is narrower than skin color; the lumping together of all European-extraction is a contingent feature of history, and is weaker than you might think. Kicking out non-Swedes would ethnic-cleansing, and would be even if the people being kicked out were white.
Nor does also deporting people for non-ethnic reasons make the rest of a remigration program not ethnic-cleansing. It's not the goal, but it's no big loss to these nationalists, because they're authoritarian race-collectivists willing to cause harm to get those people out.
That said, it isn't something nearly as drastic or categorical as these far-right, ultranationalist EU parties.
In Sweden, a child born in Sweden to a visitor or illegal immigrant is NOT automatically a citizen.
You know where else that statement is true? Denmark, UK, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Ireland, Greece. Practically the entire world, actually.
All the aforementioned countries REQUIRE legal status of the parents before the child gets citizenship status, even when born there.
So when the administration 'attacks' birthright citizenship, they are proposing to bring the US in line with the majority of the world and the entirety of Europe.
The level of naked ethnosupremacism embedded in European ideals and their constant barking at how the US is actually the most racist country is so very funny to me. If you rebuild the ship of fools plank by plank will it still dash itself against the reef?
And yes, things like race are a primary reason (for good or bad).
And yes, as my Spanish friend keeps pointing out: While the US has a large homicide rate, they can't beat the Europeans when it comes to pogroms, mass killings, etc every so many decades. Europe will be, well, Europe.
If the very constitution of the country classifies tourists as "not subject to the law of the US", that's some The Purge level popcorn. All visitors and illegal aliens would have had diplomatic immunity.
The US can amend the constitution. It has not. SCOTUS has no legal right to do it unilaterally.
When you struggle to get a job, your schools are overloaded, not well funded, you are forced to ghettoisation, get reminded every day you are not welcome or hated, get considered a criminal by default by ignorants like you, the odds of taking the wrong path becomes quickly much larger.
This is very close to magic dirt theory -- I bring a horse into a pond, does it start acting like a duck?
Thank you for naming the party donated to.
It's a shame that refusing to consort with fascists is conflated with "being political".
One of the reasons I left so called "civil" society is that for lack of a better phrasing I often found the tent to be too big.
It's because they are a political party, and he was donating to it. There's no better definition of being punished for a political opinion than being punished to donating to a legitimate party.
And their not "fascists", it's a Swedish nationalist party. Naming everything you don't like as "fascist" is a quick way to have your opinion dismissed as crazy.
Maybe being punished for some political opinions isn't a bad thing, if your political opinion is "some people don't deserve human rights" :-)
Only rich tech bros have this absurd situation where they are "punished" by a political opinion, because only they can meaningfully sway "one person, one vote" with their money.
Are we talking about the political opinion of toilet cleaners who don't have the money to donate, or the energy, or the podcasts to express it? No. That's not an opinion that can be punished, it's just a non-event for many here.
So let me not shed a tear for the political opinions of the Mullvad boss.
I am sick to death of the overapplication of the word “fascism”. It doesn’t mean “bad thing”. Distinct words are needed for distinct concepts, otherwise all political discourse ends up like here in America where you have “liberals” who are not actually liberal and “conservatives” who don’t want to conserve anything.
Edit: edited to reflect that they are probably a lot closer to Tito than Hoxha or Juche, after thinking about it.
So you admit they are a "bad thing", but you are annoyed I used the wrong word?
Ironically, most people screaming online and at demonstrations about "fascism" explicitly support this. Outside of socialized health care and university education, it's impossible to detect any traditional left-wing politics among them - deviate an inch from those two things and they instantly revert to a sort of common ignorant libertarianism.
They don't understand that socialized health care and university educations (both of which I support) are easily incorporated into a fascist state, or that Mussolini became prominent and famous as the head of Italian socialism, and saw fascism as a more efficient and powerful way to provide the things that he wanted. They can't be central to your anti-fascism.
But, in fact, all of their anti-fascism is those two things, and additionally somehow unlimited immigration (a capitalist dream.) The only even vaguely left-wing related ways to support this are 1) that communists didn't believe in nation-states, they believed in world communism, and 2) that warmongering imperialists attacked immigrants' countries of origin, so their populations are simply "chickens coming home to roost," aka "blowback."
The first is them pretending to be communists when they're social safety net liberals which falls apart pretty quickly, and the second basically paints immigrants as a punishment as the West deserves. It's no wonder that they default to liberal elite capitalist defenses of immigration - "who will pick our fruit and clean our toilets?" "I love their food, their native dances, their beautiful clothes, and their magical mysterious spirituality," "they're so much more beautiful and interesting than boring white people." At least then immigrants aren't painted as some sort of venereal disease you get from fucking other countries over.
The real reason is that they're following the anti-Wall rhetoric that was cynically aimed at Trump in 2016 by the Democrats (and the Koch brothers) in a massive colossally expensive media campaign, and mistaking that for left-wing politics.
There's a hidden strength in this from the "birthright citizenship" in the US which combined with the extreme pro-immigration stance that the Democrats had to take to differentiate from Trump. A bunch of immigrant children and citizen children of illegal immigrant parents started pretending to be left-wing when they were really mostly single-issue (themselves), and it also worked because they were often low-middle income (safety net, again themselves.) The joy that upper-middle class whites who got worthless liberal arts degrees in word salad experienced when they could attend meetings (and have sex) with this population is mostly responsible for the rise of this dimwitted activism that gets blamed on the left. It was the logical continuation of the orgy of self-love they fell into after congratulating themselves for voting for a black (but absolutely nothing to do with anything that the US did to black people) president twice. A black president of immigrant descent who made "DREAMers" an issue.
There's a similar feature in Europe with refugees, and additionally in both places because there are simply a lot of foreign elites in European universities who love to be seen as the victim rather than the oppressors that they are seen as where they come from. Europe also doesn't have the history with local black people to feel guilty about, so their guilt is mostly around colonies - and these people are from former colonies. Europeans should feel guilty about the gypsies, Holocaust and all, but they don't; they still hate them. Hell, the US left-liberal transferred their guilt about black people and natives to immigrants, who are cast as strivers and saints with big happy families to differentiate them from the abandoned and ghettoized ex-slaves who get to hear about how immigrants built America.
When every power structure in the world started adopting this stupid language, the former left were doomed. Why wouldn't they be? The beliefs of the actual, traditional left had officially been deemed "fascist" and replaced with a cobbled-together set of lifestyle beliefs and xenophilia that bankers had no problem with.
Advocating for controlling borders and opposing immigration is a legitimate political position, whether you agree with it or not. Those who describe everything they disagree with as 'fascism' are not credible people.
But I agree the F word frequently doesn't advance political discussion.
If Tor hems and haws about political speech, they 100% lose any rhetorical cover against (fallacious but politically compelling) arguments like "so you're OK with CP, but you draw the line at Swedes being against African immigration?" (which is the political issue in question re. Mullvad)
B. This isn't "Swedes being against African immigration", this is a party asking to renege on the citizenship of part of the population. "Remigration" isn't stopping immigration, it's looking at people's ancestry to strip them of their actual, present citizenship.
It may very well be that one group continuing to do business with another group is still more beneficial to their mission than cutting all ties, even if they disagree with the positions/actions of the other group. FOSS projects lately are tearing each other apart based on who is politically "better" than the rest in their eyes. The level of hypocritical hate coming from groups that claim to be tolerant is truly wild.
And we see this in geopolitics constantly as well. Remember that almost nobody cuts off contact with an entire country in perpetuity, and for good reason. Try to think of game theory and how well tit-for-tat actually works out in most aspects of society... I think cutting off all contact usually isn't the smartest solution in most situations.
Who are we to say what's morally "right" enough in every situation, especially given all kinds of other information we are not privy to? We don't know what we don't know, yet people act like they have all the answers and that only their opinion can be the right one... even in this (and every) thread we see this play out over and over with people getting royally butthurt over simple misunderstandings of subjective terminology.
There's an endless amount of scenarios we could argue...
- Why does anyone still negotiate with person/company/country XYZ after everything they've done?
- Where does one draw the line and who gets to say where that is?
- Why do people insist on calling things "fascist" that are more of a misunderstanding or difference in opinion vs much more serious authoritarian actions or aspirations?
- Why are so many people who otherwise seem quite smart, have such narrow-minded black-and-white opinions with zero interest in the possibility that they might be misinformed? How does that make any scientific sense?
Why can't we just be nicer to one another and realize that true intelligence requires both humility and empathy? When we don't take the time to try to truly understand each other's intentions, that leads to people not talking. And when people stop talking, that's when the fighting (in any sense of the word) starts.
So no misunderstanding, millionaires gotta have the poor white Swedes blame the poor brown Swedes. True intelligence requires analysis of the power relations. The Mullvad boss can do without my money, and possibly I can spare my empathy for the next immigrant that will be beaten, burned or sent back to a war-torn country or a climate-change disaster zone.
/rolleyes
Listen, I've been enough time on this Earth to know what is behind migrant acceptance, and it's not a particularly dark instinct. It's a well orchestrated distraction maneuver to have the lower classes accept the brutal increase in indentured servitude that leads, de facto, to wage-slavery for big chunks of the population.
See how much companies like Uber benefit from it for example
lol, see how easy it is to confidently push a narrative as truth?
Organizations that support the right of free speech always have to come to grips with the reality that supporting the right of free speech necessarily involves supporting the right of others to say things that the organization and/or the individuals in the organization didagree with.
Tor isn't the first such organization to have to draw distinctions between the principles it espouses and the parties it encounters, nor will it be the last.
This type of statement is not an invalidation of one's own principles, it is simply bringing clarity and focus to them. Tor advocates for freedom of speech, not for everything that others use that freedom to say.
The most difficult part about supporting free speech is that you have to support the right for people to say things you disagree with.
In the real world, if a dickhead spouts garbage you tell them to fuck off. Doesn't mean that they can't open their mouth, just that you don't want them to do it near you. A huge proportion of people online who claim that their freedom of expression is being impinged upon are dickheads who were told to fuck off.
It's "free speech", not "full agreement".
Which is what makes it the hollow virtue signaling I said it was. I never claimed they were being censored.
> "We support free speech, unless it's speech we disagree with"
Notably, you are using quotes around something that is not a quote. Your interpretation of the text does not flow from the content of the text. Tor's stance is the bog-standard pro free-speech stance, as Hall wrote in characterization of Voltaire, "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it".
Here's an actual quote from the text. This is the _second sentence_.
> We are not terminating the relationship but are setting clear boundaries on our relationship with Mullvad.
It is clear that you did not even read the text of the short post you are dismissing as "virtue signaling"!
Tor is actually still collaborating with Mullvad and they are no longer "co-branding". They are releasing a statement of their position, which is normal, necessary, and expected.
They clarify that Tor is a political project. Security and privacy are human rights goals which necessarily contend with the political context of surveillance and authoritarianism they exist in. The co-founders support of a far-right party, and the implicit support for surveillance that comes with it, are of significant and immediate concern to those who use Tor and Mullvad.
The claim that an expressed belief is principally a kind of signalling means that its content isn't a sincerely held belief by anyone, but the act of expressing such belief serves to signal to some audience a certain non-propositional kind of information. Virtue signalling is a signalling to indicate virtue, and in many practical cases is taken to include tribal loyalty to a particular political project.
Jesus used the phrase, iirc, "praying in the streets":
> And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others
The observation that behaviour signals virtue is as old as the species itself.
Protestations to caring about human rights are, often enough, a modern sort of liberal prayer, practiced in the street or the public internet. And one imagines a vast amount of corp speech exists for signalling purposes (if not virtue,, then eg., to signal strength or growth, or trust). This entire posts exists to signal, it's unclear it expresses any sincere belief whatsoever.
That's not an explanation. I don't think it's too much of an exaggeration to say everyone supports "human rights and freedoms," they just disagree on what those are.
Except they are clearly taking a stance in opposition to Swedes' freedom to decide how they want their country to be governed.
You've never heard statements such as "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."?
That is, you don't draw a real distinction between repeatedly, loudly, and publicly calling someone a cotton-headed slop-spouting pig to whom no one should pay any mind and actively working to ensure that said pig is prohibited from spouting its slop?
You can defend someone's right to say something while disagreeing with it, not supporting it, and not wanting to be associated with it. By publishing that blog post, Tor isn't attacking free speech; they are participating in it. As are you, when you respond to them, and I, when I respond to you.
> They decided it's more important to virtue signal
I'm always a bit confused by people using the term "virtue signaling". Do you never try to make ethical decisions in your life? If you do, why is it so hard to believe others are, too?
This is pretty common in my experience, along with the inverse of “vice signaling” which you don’t hear about that much.
Exactly. Now, who would think that other people's ethical decisions aren't made for sincere reasons?
As it happens, Tor's aim is that they don't know who you are or what you say!
That isn't the standard. The OP addresses an unavoidable, fundamental paradox of freedom: Someone can use their freedom to limit the freedoms of others - if we support that person's freedom, are we supporting freedom or oppression? Are we free to oppress others?
The philosopher Karl Popper famously addressed this issue. Here are a couple more ways to think about it:
* Freedom as a social contract: I support your freedom and you support mine. If I support yours and you take away mine, you've violated the contract and it's void.
* In a society built on freedom, those who use their freedom to take away others' freedom are parasites on society.
Arguably, the only speech not to tolerate is intolerance.
But that's all philosophy. Practically, nobody believes any freedom is absolute. Freedom of speech is revered and in the first amendement in the US Constitution, but nobody thinks it's absolute: you can't slander people, defraud them, threaten them, create dangerous situations (famously, you can't yell 'fire' in a crowded theater), etc.
Every time someone brings this up, I feel obligated to mention:
1. The phrase came from a supreme court case that ruled an anti-war activist's leaflets were illegal, because it was promoting people to dodge the draft. I doubt many people arguing for free speech restrictions would support this case, even if they agree with the principle.
2. Practically speaking it's no longer relevant because it was overturned with "imminent lawless action"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_Farm
You can learn a lot by reading books.
Of course, Tor's partnerships are different than the content distributed through it's network, but I still find it a bit ironic.
> We strongly oppose rhetoric that threatens other human rights and freedoms.
It was and still is funded mostly by the US Naval Research Laboratory. And considering most of the nodes are hosted on American cloud infra, if those companies share with the US Govt in real-time what is connecting in and out then the entire chain can be figured out much of the time without any kind of timing attacks. The regular person using it doesn't get as much of the privacy benefits, but the charade is making it seem like they do.
I know lots of people really believe in TOR - fair play to them. I just know it in my bones it's not as it seems.
You yourself spoke with the founder about this?
It's the best tool regular people have for privacy without a doubt.
>The regular person using it doesn't get as much of the privacy benefits, but the charade is making it seem like they do.
Just false.
If your model is simply to avoid corporate surveillance and tracking its a fantastic defense.
If your trying to go up against nation states, it never claimed to protect you from that.
'Just false.'
It depends where you are from. The US constitution is supposed to prevent spying on American citizens, but anyone outside of the USA is fair game. Most of the global population is not in the USA (like me).
'If your model is simply to avoid corporate surveillance and tracking its a fantastic defense.' - I host an onion service exactly for that reason, not for my own privacy but to let customers have that with us if they want.
'If your trying to go up against nation states, it never claimed to protect you from that.' - I disagree, it will protect an American spy a treat.
> the TOR mission was to allow spies to access the network and hide among all the other non-spy users
Tor is pretty clear about what their mission is, it's at the bottom of the Tor Project homepage https://www.torproject.org: "To advance human rights and freedoms by creating and deploying free and open source anonymity and privacy technologies, supporting their unrestricted availability and use, and furthering their scientific and popular understanding."
Claiming anything else is useless conspiracy thinking without evidence.
> It was and still is funded mostly by the US Naval Research Laboratory
The original idea came from the US Naval Research Laboratory, yes (as a way to mask the origin of messages to hide the command boat in a fleet), but the funding statement is patently false. In 2024, the majority of their government funding ($2.1M out of $2.5) came from the U.S. State Department Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, with the rest of the government money coming from even more innocuous sources. You can find this information on p41 of their IRS form: https://www.torproject.org/static/findoc/2023-2024-TheTorPro... also accessible from their Reports page at https://www.torproject.org/about/reports/
They also clarified that in this more readable post: https://forum.torproject.org/t/transparency-openness-and-our...
Certainly, you can speculate about the motivations of the U.S. State Department Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor and whether that's a front for more undercover objectives, but that front lines up pretty well with the US's (former?) foreign policy of undermining (unfriendly) dictatorial regimes, and Occam's Razor applies.
Ultimately though, the tools that Tor provides can absolutely be abused by bad actors, and ever since Silk Road, I've become convinced that the Tor network is overrun by a wretched hive of scum and villainy, where those morally defensible activities are utterly outnumbered by the criminal ones.
Using the word "conspiracy" in this conversation about TOR is wild to me.
In a post-Snowden world, it surprises me how anyone wouldn't give reasonable doubt to the THE most interesting and juicy tool linked to the US military post-2001. The tool that people think hides what they are doing and hides who they are.
If there's one thing I know, it's that the US would never in a million years leave a data source untapped or a new NIST crypto standard untampered. Their fingers are in every pie.
Both things can be true... the original need for the network necessitated the mission of the foundation itself... you can't have a global network that only spies use, or you're not blending in, so you have to make it about a public good that many civilians will also use.
Other systems like I2P, SimpleX, Tribler, Datura etc. take additional steps to mitigate such kinds of Sybil attacks that people talk about against Tor, and new methods are being worked on all the time.
Splitting up your traffic across multiple nodes/circuits/etc. as well as persistent dummy/decoy traffic are some methods I've seen discussed recently.
> if those companies share with the US Govt in real-time
IMO This is a colossal "if" and not something we can realistically determine besides saying "we know it happens sometimes, but certainly not all or even most of the time."
Everyone's threat model is different, and hiding from state-level actors is generally 1. much too complicated to succeed at, and 2. you're probably not that special in the first place that you'd actually be targeted. The privacy community is bursting at the seams with all manner of tinfoil-hat wearers and wild conspiracy theorists that think some dark boogeyman is out to get them.
I'd also like to see a source that proves "most of the nodes are hosted on American cloud infra."
I will make a correction. What I should have said is that out of the top 10 networks hosting relays or exit nodes, that close to half have an American presence and that the vast majority 80-90% of relays and exit nodes are spread out within 14 eyes countries - you can see it yourself when you look at the network. When was the last time you looked at where it was connected to and did not see a flag within either 5 eyes, 9 eyes or 14 eyes countries? While that maybe isn't the proof you want, it sure is a meaty coincidence and another reason on top of who funds it and what its purpose is for.