Re: [tor-talk] Please Remove Tor bridge and... from Censorship countries.

[Seth David Schoen <schoen@xxxxxxx>]

Jason Long writes:

> Not from ISP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! It is so bad because ISPs are under governments control. If an ISP can see I use Tor then it is a good evidence in censorship countries.You said " If a government is running the bridge, it will know where the users are who are using that particular bridge.", In your idea it is not silly? I mean was it and Tor must ban it.

My point is that people in other countries could still benefit from these
services, especially if they don't mind as much that the government of a
country where they don't live knows something about their Tor traffic.
For example, if I live in Germany, maybe I am more comfortable with my
Tor circuits going through Iran, compared to someone who lives in Iran
who is unhappy about that.  Both people might agree that the Iranian
government probably spies on the Tor network in a way they disagree
with, but the person who lives in Iran may see this as a very practical
important thing to worry about, while the perhaps who lives in Germany
may think it's not as practically important.  Or maybe someone living
in Argentina is trying to hide their location from a particular person,
but not from the government, and doesn't really mind if their data goes
through Tor nodes in their own country.

If you're using bridges to hide the fact that you use Tor at all, you
need some way to know if the particular bridges and technologies you
use can accomplish that goal.  That might include knowing the person
or organization who runs the bridge that you use.  If you use bridges
that are run by unknown people, you get a much greater risk that those
bridges are maliciously tracking your use of Tor, regardless of what
country they're physically located in.

I totally agree that surveillance by ISPs and governments is very serious
and very disturbing.  Tor's design is partly about letting people use
resources that are "somewhere else" so that perhaps they're not under
surveillance by the user's own government or ISP, or aren't all under
surveillance by the same people.  This will probably work less well
overall if the Tor developers try to single out particular countries as
extra-bad so that they can't participate in Tor at all.  That would mean
fewer countries overall participating in Tor, and an easier time for
people trying to do surveillance in the somewhat-less-bad countries.
And it would mean fewer choices for users about where to send their
traffic.

One thing that might be useful would be a way for Tor users to actively
pick what jurisdictions (or fiber optic cables or Internet exchange
points) they do or don't want their data to pass through, and have the
Tor client respect those preferences.  This is helpful both because
individual Tor users believe different things and because they have
different threat models.  I believe there's an old mechanism in the
torrc configuration file to avoid using nodes in particular countries,
but very few Tor users use this or understand how to use it.  Maybe it
could be made clearer and more convenient and integrated with the Tor
Browser interface in some way.

-- 
Seth Schoen  <schoen@xxxxxxx>
Senior Staff Technologist                       https://www.eff.org/
Electronic Frontier Foundation                  https://www.eff.org/join
815 Eddy Street, San Francisco, CA  94109       +1 415 436 9333 x107
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