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Cleaning Up Tor
Purging child porn from anonymity network
We've frequently discussed Tor, a networking system that bounces all of your traffic through a myriad of encrypted links (dubbed "onion routers"), with each hop in the chain remaining clueless as to the original source of the data. Designed as a tool for scientists, the politically censored and others, the system has been abused of late by p2p users and child pornographers. Users in our security forum point to this Security Focus report on how security researchers are trying to purge the seedier activity from the Tor network by offering server operators tools that let them track some network data sources.

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Scifience
Premium Member
join:2002-07-07
Washington, DC

2 recommendations

Scifience

Premium Member

What is so hard about this?

Lately in America, at the mere mention of "child pron" and "terrorists," the government and citizens will rally against just about anything. These two things are used as nothing more than excuses for taking away our civil liberties. People will get upset about some invasion of privacy or loss of rights, but all the government needs to do is say that it is for "protecting the children" or "stopping terrorists," and you'll have 90% of the sheeple ready to kiss the feet of the bureaucrats.

I'm certainly not personally endorsing child abuse and kidnapping and the like, but that is by no means a good enough reason to undermine freedom of speech and anonymity. To my way of thinking, there is absolutely *no* reason good enough to do so.

The entire purpose of Tor is to guarantee anonymity for anyone using it. By definition, this includes making terrorists and child pornographers anonymous as well. While we may not find the ideals or values that these groups stand for very nice, it is very hypocritical to be advocating free speech for some groups but not others. Either you have absolute freedom of speech and anonymity, or you don't have either. While blocking kiddie porn may seem to be an admirable goal, blocking any content at all is not. Today, kiddie porn; tomorrow, those who speak out against the government. Any censorship is too much censorship, especially when that censorship is occurring on a network whose entire purpose was to defeat censorship.