Thus spake Roger Dingledine (arma@xxxxxxx): > On Mon, May 13, 2013 at 08:38:53AM +0000, adrelanos wrote: > > So what's the ethical thing to do? > > > > Totally deprecate the "hide the fact, you're using Tor" use case? > > > > Have a button "My network operator threatens my person safety", which is > > honest and explains, Tor can't help > > Actually, Tor can help. The diversity of Tor users in a given locale > gives safety in numbers. If many Tor users are using Tor to read their > friends posts on Facebook, then this threatening network operator cannot > easily tell whether you're doing that or something else. The issue here > is that whether you use a bridge doesn't really change anything. I think bridge use actually still does change things for many users. First, not everywhere in the world has expensive and sophisticated DPI-based censorship systems already installed, but just about everywhere in the world *does* have the ability to inspect the endpoint IP addresses of network flows and compare them against a provided list. Second, unfortunately right now there are laughably few Tor users in many areas of the world. Consider again the Mexican blogger reporting on the drug war. If you know the area that person lives in based on what events they report, there probably aren't many Tor users in that area: https://metrics.torproject.org/users.html?graph=direct-users&country=mx As a drug lord, you're also way more capable of bribing or exploiting your way into the existing network infrastructure of that city than you are of covertly installing a new and sophisticated DPI device into that infrastructure to find Tor Bridge users, let alone obfsproxy3 and flashproxy users. As a drug lord, you probably also don't have a whole lot of problems with killing a small handful of people to make extra sure you got the right one. :/ > I guess that logic leads me towards leaving out mentions of personal > safety in the "do you need a bridge" dialog, since it's increasingly > looking like it's an orthogonal topic. I still agree here for now, but more so because it is hard to phrase this in a way that will apply to cases where it does help, using wording that reflects the level of protection you get (which certainly will be subject to change as new transports enter the picture). -- Mike Perry
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