[tor-talk] Tor is anti-censorship software

[Mansour Moufid]

On Thu, Jun 23, 2016 at 11:56 AM, Paul Syverson
<paul.syverson at nrl.navy.mil> wrote:

> Vitriol aside, the problem is that you don't get to just apply your
> own intuitive decisions about the meaning of technical terms and then
> complain based on that.

The audience of the Tor project, ever since it's provided a convenient
browser rather than just source code, is the average user, not the
technical community.  So when the Tor project website promises
"anonymity," they are not using the technical definition.

> The Tor Project remains the exemplar of being up front about what it
> provides and doesn't, what needs improvement, what people have found
> about weaknesses etc. (I know simply saying nobody is doing it better
> is not an excuse for not trying harder, but it is a standard of
> reasonableness). "Anonymity" has some intuitive meaning that has been
> articulated to multiple meanings as lots of precise mathematical and
> technical analysis teases intuitions out. If you have a better single
> word than 'anonymity' that conveys to people who don't want to read
> all that technical mumbo-jumbo what Tor provides, I think we would
> all be happy to use it. (Well I would anyway.)

If it were just about which words to use, the term "unlinkability"
has been proposed before.  But words aren't the problem.

Here's another term in the advertising material that has a specific
technical definition: traffic analysis.  Tor is advertised as a
protecting against traffic analysis (by governments a.k.a. global
adversaries) which it does not and couldn't possibly do.

The advertising doesn't correspond to reality, because it's false
and dishonest, not because the user is dumb.