The Tor Project Defends the Human Rights Racists Oppose

Yes indeed. Many thanks to steph for the post and for allison's comments above!

It is very important that the Tor community do everything possible (media outreach, official Tor Project posts here) to prevent our anti-democratic enemies from taking advantage of this kind of news item to unfairly demonize our community.

In this instance, the decision of DailyStormer's former webhost, CloudFlare, to shut down their hateful website has been very widely reported by all three US networks and around the world. This action may have led Daily Stormer to try to self-host using an onion service. I completely agree that this rumor (fact?) required an immediate response from the Tor Project, and I also agree that the right way to try to respond to negative developments allegedly involving Tor is to stress the critical role that the Tor network plays in protecting human rights activists and journalists worldwide. And can play in protecting opposition politicians, bloggers, employees in sensitive jobs (telecoms, power plants, and yes, police) and other groups which so many stories over the past few years have shown are targeted by a rapidly increasing array of cyberwar operations sponsored by various governments.

One example I like to cite: Mexican media rarely reports on drug cartel shootings because of the likelihood of reprisals (journalists who wrote stories about the mayhem have often been kidnapped, tortured and murdered by the cartels). But some brave bloggers have tried to fill this gap in the news, using Tor to protect themselves from murderous reprisals. Pro-democracy activists in such places as Hong Kong and Russia also use Tor to communicate. In the US, prompted by numerous revelations of social media spying by USG fusion centers, social justice movements are also beginning to adopt Tor in order to protect their members.

I like the analogy between the Tor network and the US road network. In the early days of the 20th century, after early adopters of the horseless buggy included some rural bank robbers, US police chiefs published serious-minded editorials calling for criminalizing automobiles. Needless to say, that didn't happen. And needless to say, US police departments were not in fact left eating the dust of fast cars driven by criminals; they simply bought their own fast cars and found that the automobile was not simply a "crime-enabling vehicle" but had many other uses, very few of which involved criminal activity.

In the just same way, the Tor network can be and will be used by all manner of people, including criminals and hate groups. But just as the number of cars on US highways which are being used as getaway vehicles by criminals represents a tiny fraction of the total traffic, we should expect that the number of users of the Tor network who are using Tor to commit crimes, or to promote hateful ideologies, is very small.

I would go further and suggest that as the financial services industry, and ecommerce generally, begin to adopt Tor hidden services and blockchain technology, it will become clear that far from enabling crimes, the Tor network offers enormous advantages for protecting ordinary consumers from becoming the victim of a financial crime. And onion services appear to offer enormous security advantages for many socially beneficial activities, such as journalism.

Tor talks about not censoring people but our comments have to be approved by administrator before they are published to me that's censorship. Isn't that kind of hypocritical.

Yay! dailystormer will provide covert traffic for other HSes! /s

To be serious, I don't think they would stand, without a CDN or something a la OnionBalance their (onion) site will be easily DDoSed. In fact I couldn't access it when they first launched it, so big win for the good human beings and I hope the DDoSes keep up until they loose their relevance.