The US governments "desperate" attempt to stop TOR

bornkillerbornkiller AdministratorIn your girlfriends snatch
There's nothing more satisfying than watching a government desperately clutching at the remnants of not only it's intrusive nature but also the need to silence others who retaliate against that same governments wrongful doings.

Forget about the "war against terrorism" because there's a worse threat than that and that's the "war against public libraries". It must come across as a PR embarrassment for something like this to be made public. That's what I think anyways.
The US Government Pressured a Small Local Library to Turn Off Its Tor Server

The Department of Homeland Security pressured a small New Hampshire library to turn off a Tor node it recently installed, according to Julia Angwin writing yesterday in ProPublica.

The middle relay for the Tor anonymity network was a pilot installed by the Library Freedom Project in mid-July as part of its project to install Tor exit nodes, which power the network, in public libraries across America.

The Kilton Public Library in Lebanon, New Hampshire agreed to be the first library in the nation to contribute bandwidth to the Tor network. By helping citizens access the internet with a layer of privacy not afforded to the regular web, the Tor browser supports many librarians' mission of improving access to information for everyone. But that anonymity also allows criminals to do criminal things, and, as a result, Tor exit node operators have frequently faced harassment from law enforcement.

According to ProPublica, the Boston DHS office confirmed that they warned the New Hampshire police of the server as a matter of “visibility/situational awareness.”

The founder of the Library Freedom Project, Alison Macrina, doesn’t buy that explanation.

"I don't know the actual content of what was said, but my understanding is that it was some fear-mongering thing, [Tor being] a safe harbor for child porn or whatever," she said in a Signal call.

The Lebanon library has turned off the Tor server until the board of trustees meet to discuss the issue next Tuesday, September 15.

In a public letter of support, a coalition of civil rights groups, including the ACLU, EFF, Free Software Foundation, Freedom of the Press Foundation, Tor Project, and many individual librarians has called on the Lebanon public library to switch the server back on. The EFF are also hosting an online petition.

Representatives of the Library Freedom Project, the Tor Project, and the ACLU of New Hampshire will give a presentation to the board meeting.

"We're going to show how much public support there is," Macrina said, "and hopefully quell some of the fears instilled by DHS and the local police. Truly it's--it comes down to a real lack of technical understanding, and the wrong attitude about free speech and free expression."

Devon Chaffee, executive director of the ACLU of New Hampshire, agrees. "From our perspective the police shouldn't be persuading libraries from doing this when Tor is funded by the State Department," she said in a phone call.

"Tor is a really important technology that allows patrons to protect their privacy and free speech rights online," she said. "Tor is important to human rights activists, to domestic violence victims, to reporters, all of whom use the Tor network."

The Tor Project weighed in with unequivocal support for the library. In a prepared statement, Tor Project spokesperson Kate Krauss wrote, “We see librarians as defenders of free speech. We want to support this library, and future libraries, as they host Tor relays, join the Tor network, and help people around the world read whatever they want, uncensored and unspied-upon—whether those people live in Lebanon, New Hampshire or Kathmandu.”

If this was an attempt to nip the project in the bud, Macrina believes DHS will find itself facing the Streisand Effect. Instead of discouraging other libraries from installing Tor nodes, "just as likely we could have a coalition of brave and fierce librarians who say, you know what? Maybe we didn't know about this project before, but now we see the opposition, that our rights are in jeopardy, we're going to sign on too."

http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-us-government-pressured-a-small-local-library-to-turn-off-its-tor-server?trk_source=recommended

Comments

  • SlartibartfastSlartibartfast Global Moderator -__-
    Interesting story. I seriously wonder if this is a red herring designed to distract people.

    Wouldn't the feds benefit from allowing it to exist but monitor the traffic that comes through it? They already have honeypot nodes, they could just add libraries to their list.

  • bornkillerbornkiller Administrator In your girlfriends snatch
    I remember when the hacker team shit hit the fan there was a power point presentation in their leaked info. Hacker team's "Project X" was distributed to governments around the world. The idea was to re-route a targets internet traffic before hitting the TOR network.

    They basically install hardware at an ISP. (Our ISPs give government their own access point after the government forced telecom to open up their monopoly to other ISPs) When they find the target they inject an exploit into their computer via their normal browser searches (By way of websites, ads etc). This kinda means the only way government can access a users TOR network habit is by infecting the users computer. It seems to me TOR is still reasonably stable and the government needs to get low down and dirty to bypass it.

    There's a mention of this on the onions website ...... somewhere. :(
  • Wouldn't the feds benefit from allowing it to exist but monitor the traffic that comes through it? They already have honeypot nodes, they could just add libraries to their list.

    If the librarians there are anything like the ones here, they'd tear the feds' throats out with their teeth if they tried it.
  • bornkillerbornkiller Administrator In your girlfriends snatch
    Prometheus wrote: »
    Wouldn't the feds benefit from allowing it to exist but monitor the traffic that comes through it? They already have honeypot nodes, they could just add libraries to their list.

    If the librarians there are anything like the ones here, they'd tear the feds' throats out with their teeth if they tried it.
    The librarians there sound hawt!
  • A couple of them are. The rest are little old ladies with a 'don't fuck with me' glare and a mouth like Bea Arthur.
  • StephenPBarrettStephenPBarrett Adviser
    edited September 2015
    Stupid government violating it's own fundamentals. The U.S. was colonized and then declared itself a sovereign nation and ever went to war twice specifically for the purpose of having freedom of speech and privacy from the government it previously was ruled by. A little more than 200 years later and it's government has turned it's back on the very principles it was created to protect.
  • bornkillerbornkiller Administrator In your girlfriends snatch
    Prometheus wrote: »
    The rest are little old ladies with a 'don't fuck with me' glare and a mouth like Bea Arthur.
    Mmmm ..... Those are what I call the "Wld Cards"
    Stupid government violating it's own fundamentals. The U.S. was colonized and then declared itself a sovereign nation and ever went to war twice specifically for the purpose of having freedom of speech and privacy from the government it previously was ruled by. A little more than 200 years later and it's government has turned it's back on the very principles it was created to protect.
    Yep! Now it's basically a dictatorship covered up with vanilla icing and chocalate sprinkles.

  • StephenPBarrettStephenPBarrett Adviser
    edited September 2015
    bornkiller wrote: »
    Yep! Now it's basically a dictatorship covered up with vanilla icing and chocalate sprinkles.

    Don't be fulled. Our presidents have very little power. It is a dictatorship with 100 monarchs.. We traded in one king across the ocean for 100 living here. I swear the best thing we could do would be to get rid of all the congress(wo)men and elect new ones along with passing an amendment for their terms to be much shorter.
  • bornkillerbornkiller Administrator In your girlfriends snatch
    bornkiller wrote: »
    Yep! Now it's basically a dictatorship covered up with vanilla icing and chocalate sprinkles.

    Don't be fulled. Our presidents have very little power. It is a dictatorship with 100 monarchs.. We traded in one king across the ocean for 100 living here. I swear the best thing we could do would be to get rid of all the congress(wo)men and elect new ones along with passing an amendment for their terms to be much shorter.
    Governments are simply puppets tethered on financial strings and controlled by coporate puppet masters. The US may as well geet rid of congress completely, because what they have to say get's trumped by the rich. :(
  • From what I heard we are one terrorist attack away from encryption and tor being made illegal.
  • They can't make Tor itself illegal. That would infringe upon the 1st Amendment rights of the public. Tor itself isn't the problem. The problem is the people who use it's high security to do illegal things like cp and drugs/gun/human trafficking and murder video channels. While there certainly is a hell of a lot of that stuff on the deep web, there also are a lot of people who use it for purposes that aren't illegal. A lot of people simply use Tor as a generic web browser just because of it's anonymity. The day Tor is officially made illegal in the U.S. will officially mark the day we have lost our 1st Amendment rights.
  • SlartibartfastSlartibartfast Global Moderator -__-
    edited September 2015
    They could try to class tor (and certain types of encryption) as "weapons grade" and regulate the fuck out of it until it dies a painful death.

    They tried with PGP a while back but gave up before it could go to court (They weren't confident and didn't want to set a precedent). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Zimmermann#PGP

  • bornkillerbornkiller Administrator In your girlfriends snatch
    I doupt they'll get rid of TOR because most of it's sponsorship comes from the US government. They've injected millions into it.
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