[tor-talk] Escape NSA just to enter commercial surveillance?

[Paul Syverson]

On Thu, Jan 14, 2016 at 05:58:50PM +0100, Markus Hitter wrote:
> 
> On 32C3 a few weeks ago ...
> 
> https://media.ccc.de/v/32c3-7322-tor_onion_services_more_useful_than_you_think
> 
> ... Roger cheered a lot about Facebook offering a hidden service.
> 
> To be honest, this surprises me quite a bit. Tor is for anonymisation,
> so one can escape tax paid surveillance by NSA, GCHQ & Co., which is
> useful. And then such a Tor user connects to Facebook, where one has to
> log in, making this anonymisation completely pointless? At least I don't
> get the point.


Tor is about separating identification from routing, as we explicitly
stated in publication way back in 1996. And it is not just for access
to a site from which one wants to remain anonymous or pseudonymous.
One of the motivating examples we gave when starting this work
c. 1995-6 was someone traveling wanting to log into a workstation at
their usual work location not wanting network observers to know their
association with where they work. Another example would be to login
but not identify to their destination where they are logging in
from. In both of these cases, you want to be not just identified but
authenticated by the destination.  This was part of the motivation for
Tor from the beginning of onion routing.

But whatever our motivation was, it is a tool. We should not be
dictating based on our original motivations creative ways that other
people find to make use of that tool as long as that use isn't abusive
or destructive.

As Robert Hunter brilliantly observed wrt commentary on lyrics he
wrote: I know where it's come from, but I don't know where it's been.

aloha,
Paul