Re: News orgs should be interested in running tor nodes

[Roger Dingledine <arma@xxxxxxx>]

On Wed, Nov 14, 2007 at 10:48:33PM +0100, Thomas Hluchnik wrote:
> Has anyone ever tried to speak with the guys from SPIEGEL, FAZ, Sueddeutsche 
> and so on that they drive own tor nodes? This would be good PR for tor.
> 
> If not yet, is there anybody who has contact to news orgs? If the great news 
> orgs in germany would have own tor nodes, they would become more sensitive 
> about what we are fighting for.

Rather than trying to get them to operate their own hardware, we might
make more progress just trying to help them understand the good uses
and good users for Tor.

We've made some progress with American journalists because by this point
quite a few of them know somebody down the hall who's used Tor and found
it useful. For example, we heard from a major American news organization
that got a knock on the door of their foreign office after they submitted
a story about an east Asian country from inside said country. Now that
they know about Tor, they don't attract as much attention from the locals
when researching their stories or submitting them.

The more journalists who recognize the value of safety online, the
more they'll be willing to see (and explain) both sides of a story when
something comes up.

So if you know a journalist, whatever country you're in, take them out
for coffee and teach them how anonymity on the Internet can work and how
diverse its users are. Offer to be a contact if they ever find themselves
needing to know more about anonymity online.

Speaking of which, we need to work more on docs that explain the good
uses of Tor. There's a start here:
https://www.torproject.org/torusers
If anybody wants to clean this up and make it look sharper, please do. :)

--Roger