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Re: Hacker strikes through student's router



On Tue, Nov 08, 2005 at 01:13:03PM -0800, Thomas Hardly wrote:
 [...]
> On its website, the EFF lists many beneficial applications of Tor,
> including socially sensitive communications (such as chat rooms for
> victims of rape, abuse, or illnesses) and journalistic communications
> with whistleblowers and dissidents. Law enforcement groups can use Tor
> for data sting operations and the U.S. Navy uses it for open source
> intelligence gathering.
> 
> Merkle warned, "The [EFF] makes a good case for the reasons to use it,
> but completely ignores the reasons why providing it might be bad for
> society."

For the record, Tor developers (and many at the EFF) are indeed of
many reasons people have claimed that developing anonymity is bad.  We
think about them a lot, and right now, we don't think that they're
correct. In fact, we discuss many of them in the abuse faq, the main
faq, and the "Challenges" paper.

In case anybody cares.

(This is not to blame Prof. Merkle; there's no telling what he was
saying in context, and what information he was going on.)

-- 
Nick Mathewson

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