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Re: [tor-talk] Tor in the media



Torizens, this is a concern troll: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troll_%
28Internet%29#Concern_troll

They have repeatedly said they "support Tor" and "want to be wrong,
but..." and then spread poison.

List administrators, you have dedicated significant resources towards
stopping censorship, and I understand that you don't want to use the
banhammer lightly, but any unkempt garden inevitably becomes a bed of
weeds, and this is something you need to kill NOW.

Even if you hold the view that this person is not intending to disrupt
this list (which I don't think you have -- you're all intelligent people
and I think you can see where this is going), it should be obvious that
this line of conversation (i.e., "is anonymity only for criminals/the
wantonly evil") is not appropriate for this list.

List members, please don't respond to concern trolls. They're easy to
spot: if someone says "I would LIKE to believe the positive case for
Tor... But Tor is totally evil in practice," or in general, says "I
agree with you, BUT I disagree with you and you are enabling evil," they
are a concern troll. Just look for the abrupt about-face. Ignore the
veneer of congeniality. It's a lie.

On Thu, 2014-10-02 at 18:35 -0400, z9wahqvh wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 2, 2014 at 4:24 PM, Mirimir <mirimir@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 
> > On 10/02/2014 01:24 PM, z9wahqvh wrote:
> >
> >
> > Even if (for argument's sake) 99% of Tor users/uses were unqualifiedly
> > evil, that would say nothing about Tor. At most, it would speak to its
> > relatively slow uptake overall, and perhaps to the prevalence of evil in
> > the world. An anonymity system with a backdoor for outing evil (however
> > defined) would be unworkable, and would soon die.
> >
> >
> I don't know how to parse "say" in this paragraph. It certainly seems to
> "say" something about the role of unsurveillable absolute anonymous
> communications systems and who is going to be attracted to them and why. It
> also would seem to raise serious questions about whether such efforts
> should be supported--and, to raise questions raised in other threads here,
> whether ISPs and other service providers and websites should let Tor relays
> through.
> 
> Note that if you are correct, you are painting an extremely dark picture of
> our political future, in which constitutional governance and rule of law
> become, strictly speaking, impossible. You may think that this will
> decrease the amount of evil in the world. My reading of world history
> suggests otherwise.
> 
> I'm not at all clear why anyone would want to trying to help such an effort
> along, unless one has a very apocalyptic view of the future.
> 
> Much more apocalyptic than the one in which our extremely flawed political
> system continues to be able to operate, and possibly be revised in favor of
> better ones. In a world of unsurveillable communications, rule of law and
> constitutional governance are over.

-- 
Sent from Ubuntu

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