cross-posted from: https://links.hackliberty.org/post/285435
When a private sector company blocks Tor, I simply boycott. No private entity is so important that I cannot live well enough without them. But when a public service blocks Tor, thatâs a problem because we are increasingly forced to use the online services of the public sector who have gone down the path of assuming offline people do not exist.
They simply block Tor without discussion. Itâs not even clear who at what level makes these decisions⌠could even be an IT admin at the bottom of the org chart. They donât even say theyâre blocking Tor. They donât even give Tor users a block message that admits that they block Tor. They donât disclose in their privacy policies that they exclude Tor.
Just a 403 error. Thatâs all we get. As if it needs no justification. Why is the Tor community so readily willing to play the pushover? Even the Tor project itself will not stand up for their own supporters.
The lack of justification is damaging because it essentially sends the message: âyou Tor-using privacy seekers are such scum we donât even have to explain why you are outcast. We donât even have to ask permission to exclude you from participating in societyâ This reinforces the myth that Tor users are criminals and encourages non-criminal Tor users to abandon Tor, thus shrinking the Tor userbase. The civilized world has evolved to a point of realizing the injustice of #collectivePunishment. At best this is a case of punishing many because of a few. I say âat bestâ because Iâm skeptical that a bad actor provokes the arbitrary denial of service.
When the question is publicly asked âwhy did service X start blocking Torâ answers always come as speculation from people who donât really know, who say they were probably attacked.
Because most malicious connections come from Tor end nodes.
If I were to say most drive-by shootings come from cars, would that be a good reason to ban cars?
In this example, itâd be cars without license plates, which is what we do
Making license plates optional would not lead to most people doing drive-by shootings. Anonymity does not make you criminal. Most people would not bother with a license plate if it were optional. And a vast majority of those anonymous drivers would not be committing drive-by shootings. Note as well that cyclists (who have no registration in most of the world) are not doing drive-by shootings despite their anonymity.
Thatâs Cloudflare propaganda talking. If cars were used almost exclusively for drive-by shootings, then the analogy would be a false analogy.
Most Tor users are legitimate users. Cloudflare mislabels legitimate traffic as malicious, then uses that misinfo deceive the public.
