> Recent concerns about a political donation by a Mullvad co-founder have raised questions about the Tor Project's funding relationship with the company.
It's kind of obnoxious that they assume everyone already knows the details of whatever controversy this is, and don't even provide a link to any explanation.
Markus Allards and Örebropartiets biggest problem isn't the anti immigrant rhetoric but their anti democratic one. The party itself is closed and self selected. They have made it explicit that they want to dismantle the Swedish administration model and allow direct political control over the government agencies. They have frequently acted disruptive in meetings and directed online harassment towards fellow politicians.
The most controversial aspect is plans to deport immigrants deemed insufficiently assimilated/productive, even if they have acquired citizenship, I think your description understates that a little.
> While Tor defends free speech, not all speech is equally compatible with our mission. We strongly oppose rhetoric that threatens other human rights and freedoms.
I disagree with this. Free speech is in essence, absolute. As soon as you start making allowances and exceptions the entire subject is moot.
The only threshold should be calls for violence or murder. AFAIK the Mullvad founder hasn't crossed this line.
I disagree with that too. Tor shouldn't choose sides in political debates.
Did all Tor developers, users and exit-node administrators get a vote in this? Or is it a small minority who decides this course?
Free speech also includes speech you may not agree with and just because you accept someone's (or some company's) donations doesn't mean you're "associated" with them.
Free speech is about government making certain forms of speech illegal. Criticism of people/ideas and freedom of association are themselves acts of free speech.
The principles of free speech can be held by individuals and organizations, even thought they don't have as much power as the government.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it" doesn't necessarily need to be scoped to just "... from government interference".
Case in point: legal or not, people cancelling speeches and people, shutting down legal speech, do NOT stand for freedom of speech. In fact, I've often heard them say "I don't particularly care about freedom of speech", verbatim,
Freedom of speech does not equate to freedom from all consequences, like disapproval and discontinuation of business relationships. If, for example, you advocate for the legalization of making CSAM, expect to be made a social pariah.
Your point is moot. If speech is entirely absolute until violence is threatened, some of the most destructive crimes in modern society would become entirely legal.
Even under U.S. law, free speech has well-defined limits.
You’re already making concessions to non absolute free speech in your comment about free speech being absolute.
I have yet to meet a free speech absolutist who was actually absolutist. At best they still struggle with violent speech and at worst they buy out a large social media platform and start censoring shit they don’t like.
True, but you have to draw a line somewhere. The U.S. is one of the staunchest defenders of free speech but even there the line in the sand is calls for violence.
> The only threshold should be calls for violence or murder.
There are other universal exceptions which I'm guessing you are forgetting:
* Slander
* Fraud
* Treason (actual treason - e.g., passing info
to the enemy in a war for survival)
What about disinformation that causes serious harm? What if I tell people that snickerdoodles prevent shellfish allergies, and they try it and some die?
Unfortunately, real life always has grey areas; no simple algorithm can address it.
"disinformation" is problematic if it presupposes an arbiter of truth. We've seen time and again that people and organizations in such positions will abuse them rather than uphold their principles.
At the end of the day, you either engage with the speech and argue against the idea, or you appeal to authority and hope it is worthy of your trust. Personally, I'm a little too jaded for that.
"While Tor defends free speech, not all speech is equally compatible with our mission. We strongly oppose rhetoric that threatens other human rights and freedoms."
They clearly just need the funding, which is few and far between on tools like this and they aren’t in a position to be able to take a moral stance. Can’t say I blame them too much other than the co-branding idea.
Content aside, is there anything or anyone forcing Foss projects to pick up this voice?
I understand that TOR is big and professional and all, but why does this read like a press statement of every tech corp under the sun?
Do we have to talk like this?
if you don't, some will say "you are not treating this seriously, it's not a joke, humans life's are at stake and you can't even bother writing a professional response"
And whatever you do to please these "some", they will never be satisfied and just jump on to the next hate bandwagon the moment you give in to their demands. You never benefit from listening to these online activists, who already hate you and already don't use your product. Even more so when it's a non-profit product.
Yes, but, does that someone matter? Do they still have leverage to be of any concern?
Because.. looking at the whole.. uh.. stuff going on in US politics, I'm kinda doubtful. There are a lot of real and big problems going on right now that far outweigh choice of specific tone and words I'd say.
I mean. Their choice and all, but it comes with the trade-off of being massively alienating, and I'd argue that the cost benefit calculation of that might have to be redone, taking the current state of the world into account.
Because they have a very strong track record of good performance, reliability, and defense of privacy. VPN businesses largely sell trust and Mullvad has earned a lot of it
> While Tor defends free speech, not all speech is equally compatible with our mission.
It's sad to see the backslide. In the olden days free speech absolutists would defend all speech short of fires in the cinema. Nowadays it has to be compatible with their brand of political correctness else they will tar and brush you or stay conspicuously silent.
You see the same backsliding in the Electronic Frontier Foundation and other non profits. They are a lot more neoliberal now than liberal. Interests over values.
Free speech absolutists can still have opinions, criticize others, and choose who to associate with. They're not advocating for censorship or legal penalties for speech.
Yep. "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." and similar such sentiments.
One can publicly declare a speaker to be a wrongheaded pig that all decent people should ignore, but that's a wholly different thing from ensuring that said pig is unable to utter its wrongheaded ideas in public.
I interpreted this as just a clumsy rewording of the old quote, "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Free speech advocates support the right of everyone to set up a stall in the marketplace of ideas, but don't have to support every idea that sets up a stall.
A publisher of gay erotica might support free speech, and find themselves alongside revolutionary communists, hitler-heiling nazis and radical islamists distributing bomb-making manuals - but the groups aren't allies or friends outside of that.
The Tor statement doesn't mention the actual donation or party. Daniel Berntsson the co-owner of Mullvad, donated approximately US$500,000 to the far-right Örebro Party in Sweden. It's an ethno-nationalist party that is pushing for "remigration". From Wikipedia: "Remigration is a far-right concept referring to the ethnic cleansing via mass deportation of non-white minority populations, especially immigrants and sometimes including native-born citizens, to their place of racial ancestry."
Every single country on earth participates in remigration, it is not ethnic cleansing by any stretch, given the amount of white people being deported from the US, Europe and other places all the time.
Europe has this absurdist political compass that calls any anti-immigration party "far-right", even when their official party platform is center-left or far-left in every single other respect (like Örebro's current platform of substantial expansions of social welfare program funding). Same is true in France, where you have a party with far-left socialist economics and anti-immigration sentiment that is bucketed as "far-right".
Anyone with at least half a brain working understand that crime rate is the consequence of racism and far right influence.
When you struggle to get a job, your schools are overloaded, not well funded, you are forced to ghettoisation, get reminded every day you are not welcome or hated, get considered a criminal by default by ignorants like you, the odds of taking the wrong path becomes quickly much larger.
> It's a shame that refusing to consort with fascists is conflated with "being political".
It's because they are a political party, and he was donating to it. There's no better definition of being punished for a political opinion than being punished to donating to a legitimate party.
And their not "fascists", it's a Swedish nationalist party.
Naming everything you don't like as "fascist" is a quick way to have your opinion dismissed as crazy.
> While Tor defends free speech, not all speech is equally compatible with our mission.
If Tor hems and haws about political speech, they 100% lose any rhetorical cover against (fallacious but politically compelling) arguments like "so you're OK with CP, but you draw the line at Swedes being against African immigration?" (which is the political issue in question re. Mullvad)
It's a false equivalence. If I design a censorship-resistant network, it doesn't imply that I endorse everything flowing through that network. And just because I'm in favor of free speech doesn't mean I can't criticize the speech of others as a private citizen or organization.
A. Is Tor openly accepting donations from child porn networks?
B. This isn't "Swedes being against African immigration", this is a party asking to renege on the citizenship of part of the population. "Remigration" isn't stopping immigration, it's looking at people's ancestry to strip them of their actual, present citizenship.
If we look at the origins and funding of the Tor network, it's pretty clear that CSAM is not the priority, although it is a priority. But mostly it's about preventing terror groups like ISIS from freely organizing massacres in France, Germany and maybe even the United States.
There's really no end to this game of altruism olympics people seem to want to play.
It may very well be that one group continuing to do business with another group is still more beneficial to their mission than cutting all ties, even if they disagree with the positions/actions of the other group. FOSS projects lately are tearing each other apart based on who is politically "better" than the rest in their eyes. The level of hypocritical hate coming from groups that claim to be tolerant is truly wild.
And we see this in geopolitics constantly as well. Remember that almost nobody cuts off contact with an entire country in perpetuity, and for good reason. Try to think of game theory and how well tit-for-tat actually works out in most aspects of society... I think cutting off all contact usually isn't the smartest solution in most situations.
Who are we to say what's morally "right" enough in every situation, especially given all kinds of other information we are not privy to? We don't know what we don't know, yet people act like they have all the answers and that only their opinion can be the right one... even in this (and every) thread we see this play out over and over with people getting royally butthurt over simple misunderstandings of subjective terminology.
There's an endless amount of scenarios we could argue...
- Why does anyone still negotiate with person/company/country XYZ after everything they've done?
- Where does one draw the line and who gets to say where that is?
- Why do people insist on calling things "fascist" that are more of a misunderstanding or difference in opinion vs much more serious authoritarian actions or aspirations?
- Why are so many people who otherwise seem quite smart, have such narrow-minded black-and-white opinions with zero interest in the possibility that they might be misinformed? How does that make any scientific sense?
Why can't we just be nicer to one another and realize that true intelligence requires both humility and empathy? When we don't take the time to try to truly understand each other's intentions, that leads to people not talking. And when people stop talking, that's when the fighting (in any sense of the word) starts.
Listen, I've been enough time on this Earth to know what is behind immigrant demonization, and it's not a particularly dark instinct. It's a well orchestrated distraction maneuver to have the lower classes find somebody to blame that is not the brutal increase in accomodation prices, that leads, de facto, to wage-slavery for big chunks of the population.
So no misunderstanding, millionaires gotta have the poor white Swedes blame the poor brown Swedes. True intelligence requires analysis of the power relations. The Mullvad boss can do without my money, and possibly I can spare my empathy for the next immigrant that will be beaten, burned or sent back to a war-torn country or a climate-change disaster zone.
> It's a well orchestrated distraction maneuver to have the lower classes find somebody to blame that is not the brutal increase in accomodation prices, that leads, de facto, to wage-slavery for big chunks of the population.
/rolleyes
Listen, I've been enough time on this Earth to know what is behind migrant acceptance, and it's not a particularly dark instinct. It's a well orchestrated distraction maneuver to have the lower classes accept the brutal increase in indentured servitude that leads, de facto, to wage-slavery for big chunks of the population.
See how much companies like Uber benefit from it for example
lol, see how easy it is to confidently push a narrative as truth?
> "We are not terminating the relationship but are setting clear boundaries on our relationship with Mullvad"
Organizations that support the right of free speech always have to come to grips with the reality that supporting the right of free speech necessarily involves supporting the right of others to say things that the organization and/or the individuals in the organization didagree with.
Tor isn't the first such organization to have to draw distinctions between the principles it espouses and the parties it encounters, nor will it be the last.
This type of statement is not an invalidation of one's own principles, it is simply bringing clarity and focus to them. Tor advocates for freedom of speech, not for everything that others use that freedom to say.
That’s not what’s being said. It’s possible to support the freedom of anyone to say anything while excluding those whose beliefs are directly opposed to your goals from your organization.
if you exclude those who are opposed to you then you aren't supporting the right for anyone to say anything. Saying you support anyone saying anything but not allowing some people to say certain things is doublethink.
The most difficult part about supporting free speech is that you have to support the right for people to say things you disagree with.
"Virtue signal" is a bad-faith term that means nothing other than its use as a cheap dismissal from people refusing to engage with the content of text, even short text like this. It's not a serious analysis, or a criticism of anything at all.
> "We support free speech, unless it's speech we disagree with"
Notably, you are using quotes around something that is not a quote. Your interpretation of the text does not flow from the content of the text. Tor's stance is the bog-standard pro free-speech stance, as Hall wrote in characterization of Voltaire, "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it".
Here's an actual quote from the text. This is the _second sentence_.
> We are not terminating the relationship but are setting clear boundaries on our relationship with Mullvad.
It is clear that you did not even read the text of the short post you are dismissing as "virtue signaling"!
Tor is actually still collaborating with Mullvad and they are no longer "co-branding". They are releasing a statement of their position, which is normal, necessary, and expected.
They clarify that Tor is a political project. Security and privacy are human rights goals which necessarily contend with the political context of surveillance and authoritarianism they exist in. The co-founders support of a far-right party, and the implicit support for surveillance that comes with it, are of significant and immediate concern to those who use Tor and Mullvad.
I mean it's not clear how its supposed to be anything other than virtue signally.
The claim that an expressed belief is principally a kind of signalling means that its content isn't a sincerely held belief by anyone, but the act of expressing such belief serves to signal to some audience a certain non-propositional kind of information. Virtue signalling is a signalling to indicate virtue, and in many practical cases is taken to include tribal loyalty to a particular political project.
Jesus used the phrase, iirc, "praying in the streets":
> And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others
The observation that behaviour signals virtue is as old as the species itself.
Protestations to caring about human rights are, often enough, a modern sort of liberal prayer, practiced in the street or the public internet. And one imagines a vast amount of corp speech exists for signalling purposes (if not virtue,, then eg., to signal strength or growth, or trust). This entire posts exists to signal, it's unclear it expresses any sincere belief whatsoever.
> They explain it in the next sentence: "We strongly oppose rhetoric that threatens other human rights and freedoms."
That's not an explanation. I don't think it's too much of an exaggeration to say everyone supports "human rights and freedoms," they just disagree on what those are.
Why are they opposing the mere rhetoric and not the ideas themselves? You either support free speech unreservedly, including for your political opposites, or you don't.
> "We support free speech, unless it's speech we disagree with"
You can defend someone's right to say something while disagreeing with it, not supporting it, and not wanting to be associated with it. By publishing that blog post, Tor isn't attacking free speech; they are participating in it. As are you, when you respond to them, and I, when I respond to you.
> They decided it's more important to virtue signal
I'm always a bit confused by people using the term "virtue signaling". Do you never try to make ethical decisions in your life? If you do, why is it so hard to believe others are, too?
The implication of the term “virtue signaling” is that you’re primarily seeking acclaim (or dodging criticism) by taking a given position, and that your position likely isn’t sincere.
This is pretty common in my experience, along with the inverse of “vice signaling” which you don’t hear about that much.
That isn't the standard. The OP addresses an unavoidable, fundamental paradox of freedom: Someone can use their freedom to limit the freedoms of others - if we support that person's freedom, are we supporting freedom or oppression? Are we free to oppress others?
The philosopher Karl Popper famously addressed this issue. Here are a couple more ways to think about it:
* Freedom as a social contract: I support your freedom and you support mine. If I support yours and you take away mine, you've violated the contract and it's void.
* In a society built on freedom, those who use their freedom to take away others' freedom are parasites on society.
Arguably, the only speech not to tolerate is intolerance.
But that's all philosophy. Practically, nobody believes any freedom is absolute. Freedom of speech is revered and in the first amendement in the US Constitution, but nobody thinks it's absolute: you can't slander people, defraud them, threaten them, create dangerous situations (famously, you can't yell 'fire' in a crowded theater), etc.
>create dangerous situations (famously, you can't yell 'fire' in a crowded theater), etc.
Every time someone brings this up, I feel obligated to mention:
1. The phrase came from a supreme court case that ruled an anti-war activist's leaflets were illegal, because it was promoting people to dodge the draft. I doubt many people arguing for free speech restrictions would support this case, even if they agree with the principle.
2. Practically speaking it's no longer relevant because it was overturned with "imminent lawless action"
Every time I'm appalled and both surprised and not surprised to see yet another rich CEO or founder be a genuinely awful person supporting causes that hurt people in some way. I guess it's just a prerequisite for the job? Are there CEOs and founders who aren't awful?
I am not saying the content of the speech is morally equal, but Tor's explicit mission is to make people anonymous and protect speech. The moment you start inspecting it, Tor's mission is negated.
Of course, Tor's partnerships are different than the content distributed through it's network, but I still find it a bit ironic.
"The Tor Project’s mission is to advance human rights and freedoms." - I might be completely barking up the wrong tree here, but I thought the TOR mission was to allow spies to access the network and hide among all the other non-spy users.
It was and still is funded mostly by the US Naval Research Laboratory. And considering most of the nodes are hosted on American cloud infra, if those companies share with the US Govt in real-time what is connecting in and out then the entire chain can be figured out much of the time without any kind of timing attacks. The regular person using it doesn't get as much of the privacy benefits, but the charade is making it seem like they do.
I know lots of people really believe in TOR - fair play to them. I just know it in my bones it's not as it seems.
From what I recall, talking to one of the Tor founders about this, Tor was created with overseas US military personnel in mind. E.g. A soldier’s location could be compromised through foreign ISPs if they accessed sites like .mil domains directly. Tor was a way of preventing this problem. There were other use cases but this one stood out for me and it was one of the initial ones considered.
Pretty on point with what I'm saying. I remember when Tor first launched and it was definitely framed at the time as for human rights. I absolutely believed all of that for years.
'Meh, and yet anyone can run a relay or onion service in a few clicks.' - of course.
'Just false.'
It depends where you are from. The US constitution is supposed to prevent spying on American citizens, but anyone outside of the USA is fair game. Most of the global population is not in the USA (like me).
'If your model is simply to avoid corporate surveillance and tracking its a fantastic defense.' - I host an onion service exactly for that reason, not for my own privacy but to let customers have that with us if they want.
'If your trying to go up against nation states, it never claimed to protect you from that.' - I disagree, it will protect an American spy a treat.
> the TOR mission was to allow spies to access the network and hide among all the other non-spy users
Tor is pretty clear about what their mission is, it's at the bottom of the Tor Project homepage https://www.torproject.org: "To advance human rights and freedoms by creating and deploying free and open source anonymity and privacy technologies, supporting their unrestricted availability and use, and furthering their scientific and popular understanding."
Claiming anything else is useless conspiracy thinking without evidence.
> It was and still is funded mostly by the US Naval Research Laboratory
The original idea came from the US Naval Research Laboratory, yes (as a way to mask the origin of messages to hide the command boat in a fleet), but the funding statement is patently false. In 2024, the majority of their government funding ($2.1M out of $2.5) came from the U.S. State Department Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, with the rest of the government money coming from even more innocuous sources. You can find this information on p41 of their IRS form: https://www.torproject.org/static/findoc/2023-2024-TheTorPro... also accessible from their Reports page at https://www.torproject.org/about/reports/
Certainly, you can speculate about the motivations of the U.S. State Department Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor and whether that's a front for more undercover objectives, but that front lines up pretty well with the US's (former?) foreign policy of undermining (unfriendly) dictatorial regimes, and Occam's Razor applies.
Ultimately though, the tools that Tor provides can absolutely be abused by bad actors, and ever since Silk Road, I've become convinced that the Tor network is overrun by a wretched hive of scum and villainy, where those morally defensible activities are utterly outnumbered by the criminal ones.
"Claiming anything else is useless conspiracy thinking without evidence."
Using the word "conspiracy" in this conversation about TOR is wild to me.
In a post-Snowden world, it surprises me how anyone wouldn't give reasonable doubt to the THE most interesting and juicy tool linked to the US military post-2001. The tool that people think hides what they are doing and hides who they are.
If there's one thing I know, it's that the US would never in a million years leave a data source untapped or a new NIST crypto standard untampered. Their fingers are in every pie.
> I thought the TOR mission was to allow spies to access the network and hide among all the other non-spy users.
Both things can be true... the original need for the network necessitated the mission of the foundation itself... you can't have a global network that only spies use, or you're not blending in, so you have to make it about a public good that many civilians will also use.
Other systems like I2P, SimpleX, Tribler, Datura etc. take additional steps to mitigate such kinds of Sybil attacks that people talk about against Tor, and new methods are being worked on all the time.
Splitting up your traffic across multiple nodes/circuits/etc. as well as persistent dummy/decoy traffic are some methods I've seen discussed recently.
> if those companies share with the US Govt in real-time
IMO This is a colossal "if" and not something we can realistically determine besides saying "we know it happens sometimes, but certainly not all or even most of the time."
Everyone's threat model is different, and hiding from state-level actors is generally 1. much too complicated to succeed at, and 2. you're probably not that special in the first place that you'd actually be targeted. The privacy community is bursting at the seams with all manner of tinfoil-hat wearers and wild conspiracy theorists that think some dark boogeyman is out to get them.
I'd also like to see a source that proves "most of the nodes are hosted on American cloud infra."
I'd also like to see a source that proves "most of the nodes are hosted on American cloud infra."
I will make a correction. What I should have said is that out of the top 10 networks hosting relays or exit nodes, that close to half have an American presence and that the vast majority 80-90% of relays and exit nodes are spread out within 14 eyes countries - you can see it yourself when you look at the network. When was the last time you looked at where it was connected to and did not see a flag within either 5 eyes, 9 eyes or 14 eyes countries? While that maybe isn't the proof you want, it sure is a meaty coincidence and another reason on top of who funds it and what its purpose is for.
> Recent concerns about a political donation by a Mullvad co-founder have raised questions about the Tor Project's funding relationship with the company.
It's kind of obnoxious that they assume everyone already knows the details of whatever controversy this is, and don't even provide a link to any explanation.
So what's the controversy?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48717469
Mullvad co-founder donated money to a Swedish political party that wants to limit African immigration to Sweden
Markus Allards and Örebropartiets biggest problem isn't the anti immigrant rhetoric but their anti democratic one. The party itself is closed and self selected. They have made it explicit that they want to dismantle the Swedish administration model and allow direct political control over the government agencies. They have frequently acted disruptive in meetings and directed online harassment towards fellow politicians.
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The most controversial aspect is plans to deport immigrants deemed insufficiently assimilated/productive, even if they have acquired citizenship, I think your description understates that a little.
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You would be crazy to wish the opposite, and worse, to force it on people who never asked for it in the first place.
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> While Tor defends free speech, not all speech is equally compatible with our mission. We strongly oppose rhetoric that threatens other human rights and freedoms.
I disagree with this. Free speech is in essence, absolute. As soon as you start making allowances and exceptions the entire subject is moot.
The only threshold should be calls for violence or murder. AFAIK the Mullvad founder hasn't crossed this line.
Tor isn't saying 'This speech should not be allowed', they're saying 'This speech is speech we disagree with, and don't want associated with TOR'.
I disagree with that too. Tor shouldn't choose sides in political debates.
Did all Tor developers, users and exit-node administrators get a vote in this? Or is it a small minority who decides this course?
Free speech also includes speech you may not agree with and just because you accept someone's (or some company's) donations doesn't mean you're "associated" with them.
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You surely recognized that your second paragraph directly contradicts your first as you wrote this?
Free speech is about government making certain forms of speech illegal. Criticism of people/ideas and freedom of association are themselves acts of free speech.
No, free speech laws are.
The principles of free speech can be held by individuals and organizations, even thought they don't have as much power as the government.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it" doesn't necessarily need to be scoped to just "... from government interference".
Case in point: legal or not, people cancelling speeches and people, shutting down legal speech, do NOT stand for freedom of speech. In fact, I've often heard them say "I don't particularly care about freedom of speech", verbatim,
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Freedom of speech does not equate to freedom from all consequences, like disapproval and discontinuation of business relationships. If, for example, you advocate for the legalization of making CSAM, expect to be made a social pariah.
> Free speech is in essence, absolute.
Your point is moot. If speech is entirely absolute until violence is threatened, some of the most destructive crimes in modern society would become entirely legal.
Even under U.S. law, free speech has well-defined limits.
You’re already making concessions to non absolute free speech in your comment about free speech being absolute.
I have yet to meet a free speech absolutist who was actually absolutist. At best they still struggle with violent speech and at worst they buy out a large social media platform and start censoring shit they don’t like.
True, but you have to draw a line somewhere. The U.S. is one of the staunchest defenders of free speech but even there the line in the sand is calls for violence.
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The thing is: freedom of speech (Like all other freedoms), is a two-way street.
You're free to say whatever messed up stuff you want to me, and I'm free to tell you to "Go F*CK Yourself"
People just forget consequences for your actions exist lol, hilarious to see and kinda sad
> The only threshold should be calls for violence or murder.
There are other universal exceptions which I'm guessing you are forgetting:
What about disinformation that causes serious harm? What if I tell people that snickerdoodles prevent shellfish allergies, and they try it and some die?
Unfortunately, real life always has grey areas; no simple algorithm can address it.
"disinformation" is problematic if it presupposes an arbiter of truth. We've seen time and again that people and organizations in such positions will abuse them rather than uphold their principles.
At the end of the day, you either engage with the speech and argue against the idea, or you appeal to authority and hope it is worthy of your trust. Personally, I'm a little too jaded for that.
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"While Tor defends free speech, not all speech is equally compatible with our mission. We strongly oppose rhetoric that threatens other human rights and freedoms."
Double think.
No it is not. This is literally classical liberalism, as espoused by Voltaire.
It's the reverse of what Voltaire said.
They clearly just need the funding, which is few and far between on tools like this and they aren’t in a position to be able to take a moral stance. Can’t say I blame them too much other than the co-branding idea.
Tor itself was invented by the US Naval Research Lab and still today is funded >50% by the US Department of Defense.
I thought DOGE took care of that.
Content aside, is there anything or anyone forcing Foss projects to pick up this voice?
I understand that TOR is big and professional and all, but why does this read like a press statement of every tech corp under the sun? Do we have to talk like this?
if you don't, some will say "you are not treating this seriously, it's not a joke, humans life's are at stake and you can't even bother writing a professional response"
> some will say
And whatever you do to please these "some", they will never be satisfied and just jump on to the next hate bandwagon the moment you give in to their demands. You never benefit from listening to these online activists, who already hate you and already don't use your product. Even more so when it's a non-profit product.
Yes, but, does that someone matter? Do they still have leverage to be of any concern?
Because.. looking at the whole.. uh.. stuff going on in US politics, I'm kinda doubtful. There are a lot of real and big problems going on right now that far outweigh choice of specific tone and words I'd say.
I mean. Their choice and all, but it comes with the trade-off of being massively alienating, and I'd argue that the cost benefit calculation of that might have to be redone, taking the current state of the world into account.
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Ooof I don't want these two to break up.
Mullvad browser is my favorite browser, and it's tor browser minus connection to tor.
Why is Mullvad making so much money and other VPN providers are seemingly not?
If anyone recommends VPN, it is usually the one. Others have greater chance to be scam or selling your data.
Does that include Proton's VPN?
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They have a product good enough that they don't need a huge advertising budget that involves every channel on YouTube
Because they have a very strong track record of good performance, reliability, and defense of privacy. VPN businesses largely sell trust and Mullvad has earned a lot of it
Are they? I can only imagine MordVpn makes a lot of money
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expected virtue signaling but at least they aren't stupid enough cut relationships completely.
> While Tor defends free speech, not all speech is equally compatible with our mission.
It's sad to see the backslide. In the olden days free speech absolutists would defend all speech short of fires in the cinema. Nowadays it has to be compatible with their brand of political correctness else they will tar and brush you or stay conspicuously silent.
You see the same backsliding in the Electronic Frontier Foundation and other non profits. They are a lot more neoliberal now than liberal. Interests over values.
Free speech absolutists can still have opinions, criticize others, and choose who to associate with. They're not advocating for censorship or legal penalties for speech.
Yep. "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." and similar such sentiments.
One can publicly declare a speaker to be a wrongheaded pig that all decent people should ignore, but that's a wholly different thing from ensuring that said pig is unable to utter its wrongheaded ideas in public.
I interpreted this as just a clumsy rewording of the old quote, "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Free speech advocates support the right of everyone to set up a stall in the marketplace of ideas, but don't have to support every idea that sets up a stall.
A publisher of gay erotica might support free speech, and find themselves alongside revolutionary communists, hitler-heiling nazis and radical islamists distributing bomb-making manuals - but the groups aren't allies or friends outside of that.
Well, their defence now is probably contingent on a donation first.
The Tor statement doesn't mention the actual donation or party. Daniel Berntsson the co-owner of Mullvad, donated approximately US$500,000 to the far-right Örebro Party in Sweden. It's an ethno-nationalist party that is pushing for "remigration". From Wikipedia: "Remigration is a far-right concept referring to the ethnic cleansing via mass deportation of non-white minority populations, especially immigrants and sometimes including native-born citizens, to their place of racial ancestry."
Despite your implication how is Oreboro Party far-right, wikipedia actually states they are:
characterized as left-wing, right-wing, populist, nationalist, and conservative
and:
Ideology: Populism, Swedish nationalism, Left-conservatism, Anti-corruption, Anti-establishment, Anti-immigration
Political position: Syncretic
So basically everyone can (dis)like it for some reason...
They are quite honestly schizophrenic...
It's ok, everything Wikipedia doesn't like it calls a "far-right conspiracy theory"
Like the issue of the grooming gangs in the UK
remind me which race makes up 81% of prisoners convicted of a sexual offence in the UK?
remind me what the home office said about which ethnicity “group-based child sexual exploitation offenders” are most commonly?
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Örebro Party is also pro-surveillance.
That seems pretty significant. Could you provide some more detail or evidence?
Every single country on earth participates in remigration, it is not ethnic cleansing by any stretch, given the amount of white people being deported from the US, Europe and other places all the time.
Europe has this absurdist political compass that calls any anti-immigration party "far-right", even when their official party platform is center-left or far-left in every single other respect (like Örebro's current platform of substantial expansions of social welfare program funding). Same is true in France, where you have a party with far-left socialist economics and anti-immigration sentiment that is bucketed as "far-right".
Every country does deportation. "Remigration" is a neo-Nazi term that is explicitly a call for removal not by immigration status, but by ethnicity.
We know what ethnic-cleansing looks like, and the horrors it both requires to do and eventually causes.
"Government goodies, but just for people like us" is very much compatible with far-right governance.
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The US is not close to doing anything similar to what that party is calling for (e.g. advocating for deporting those born in Sweden).
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Anyone with at least half a brain working understand that crime rate is the consequence of racism and far right influence.
When you struggle to get a job, your schools are overloaded, not well funded, you are forced to ghettoisation, get reminded every day you are not welcome or hated, get considered a criminal by default by ignorants like you, the odds of taking the wrong path becomes quickly much larger.
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These days you can't even call for ethnic purity laws without being called far-right. These days,
>Daniel Berntsson the co-owner of Mullvad, donated approximately US$500,000 to the far-right Örebro Party in Sweden
Thank you for naming the party donated to.
It's a shame that refusing to consort with fascists is conflated with "being political".
One of the reasons I left so called "civil" society is that for lack of a better phrasing I often found the tent to be too big.
> It's a shame that refusing to consort with fascists is conflated with "being political".
It's because they are a political party, and he was donating to it. There's no better definition of being punished for a political opinion than being punished to donating to a legitimate party.
And their not "fascists", it's a Swedish nationalist party. Naming everything you don't like as "fascist" is a quick way to have your opinion dismissed as crazy.
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> While Tor defends free speech, not all speech is equally compatible with our mission.
If Tor hems and haws about political speech, they 100% lose any rhetorical cover against (fallacious but politically compelling) arguments like "so you're OK with CP, but you draw the line at Swedes being against African immigration?" (which is the political issue in question re. Mullvad)
It's a false equivalence. If I design a censorship-resistant network, it doesn't imply that I endorse everything flowing through that network. And just because I'm in favor of free speech doesn't mean I can't criticize the speech of others as a private citizen or organization.
Surely this depends on the channel you are using to communicate those endorsements and criticisms.
A. Is Tor openly accepting donations from child porn networks?
B. This isn't "Swedes being against African immigration", this is a party asking to renege on the citizenship of part of the population. "Remigration" isn't stopping immigration, it's looking at people's ancestry to strip them of their actual, present citizenship.
If we look at the origins and funding of the Tor network, it's pretty clear that CSAM is not the priority, although it is a priority. But mostly it's about preventing terror groups like ISIS from freely organizing massacres in France, Germany and maybe even the United States.
There's really no end to this game of altruism olympics people seem to want to play.
It may very well be that one group continuing to do business with another group is still more beneficial to their mission than cutting all ties, even if they disagree with the positions/actions of the other group. FOSS projects lately are tearing each other apart based on who is politically "better" than the rest in their eyes. The level of hypocritical hate coming from groups that claim to be tolerant is truly wild.
And we see this in geopolitics constantly as well. Remember that almost nobody cuts off contact with an entire country in perpetuity, and for good reason. Try to think of game theory and how well tit-for-tat actually works out in most aspects of society... I think cutting off all contact usually isn't the smartest solution in most situations.
Who are we to say what's morally "right" enough in every situation, especially given all kinds of other information we are not privy to? We don't know what we don't know, yet people act like they have all the answers and that only their opinion can be the right one... even in this (and every) thread we see this play out over and over with people getting royally butthurt over simple misunderstandings of subjective terminology.
There's an endless amount of scenarios we could argue...
- Why does anyone still negotiate with person/company/country XYZ after everything they've done?
- Where does one draw the line and who gets to say where that is?
- Why do people insist on calling things "fascist" that are more of a misunderstanding or difference in opinion vs much more serious authoritarian actions or aspirations?
- Why are so many people who otherwise seem quite smart, have such narrow-minded black-and-white opinions with zero interest in the possibility that they might be misinformed? How does that make any scientific sense?
Why can't we just be nicer to one another and realize that true intelligence requires both humility and empathy? When we don't take the time to try to truly understand each other's intentions, that leads to people not talking. And when people stop talking, that's when the fighting (in any sense of the word) starts.
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Listen, I've been enough time on this Earth to know what is behind immigrant demonization, and it's not a particularly dark instinct. It's a well orchestrated distraction maneuver to have the lower classes find somebody to blame that is not the brutal increase in accomodation prices, that leads, de facto, to wage-slavery for big chunks of the population.
So no misunderstanding, millionaires gotta have the poor white Swedes blame the poor brown Swedes. True intelligence requires analysis of the power relations. The Mullvad boss can do without my money, and possibly I can spare my empathy for the next immigrant that will be beaten, burned or sent back to a war-torn country or a climate-change disaster zone.
That's a weird take for Sweden, a famously equal and famously rich country.
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> It's a well orchestrated distraction maneuver to have the lower classes find somebody to blame that is not the brutal increase in accomodation prices, that leads, de facto, to wage-slavery for big chunks of the population.
/rolleyes
Listen, I've been enough time on this Earth to know what is behind migrant acceptance, and it's not a particularly dark instinct. It's a well orchestrated distraction maneuver to have the lower classes accept the brutal increase in indentured servitude that leads, de facto, to wage-slavery for big chunks of the population.
See how much companies like Uber benefit from it for example
lol, see how easy it is to confidently push a narrative as truth?
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> "We are not terminating the relationship but are setting clear boundaries on our relationship with Mullvad"
Organizations that support the right of free speech always have to come to grips with the reality that supporting the right of free speech necessarily involves supporting the right of others to say things that the organization and/or the individuals in the organization didagree with.
Tor isn't the first such organization to have to draw distinctions between the principles it espouses and the parties it encounters, nor will it be the last.
This type of statement is not an invalidation of one's own principles, it is simply bringing clarity and focus to them. Tor advocates for freedom of speech, not for everything that others use that freedom to say.
That’s not what’s being said. It’s possible to support the freedom of anyone to say anything while excluding those whose beliefs are directly opposed to your goals from your organization.
if you exclude those who are opposed to you then you aren't supporting the right for anyone to say anything. Saying you support anyone saying anything but not allowing some people to say certain things is doublethink.
The most difficult part about supporting free speech is that you have to support the right for people to say things you disagree with.
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If you only support the right of people you agree with to speak freely, you don't support free speech.
They aren't even severing the relationship with the provider, let alone censoring the person.
It's "free speech", not "full agreement".
> They aren't even severing the relationship with the provider, let alone censoring the person.
Which is what makes it the hollow virtue signaling I said it was. I never claimed they were being censored.
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"Virtue signal" is a bad-faith term that means nothing other than its use as a cheap dismissal from people refusing to engage with the content of text, even short text like this. It's not a serious analysis, or a criticism of anything at all.
> "We support free speech, unless it's speech we disagree with"
Notably, you are using quotes around something that is not a quote. Your interpretation of the text does not flow from the content of the text. Tor's stance is the bog-standard pro free-speech stance, as Hall wrote in characterization of Voltaire, "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it".
Here's an actual quote from the text. This is the _second sentence_.
> We are not terminating the relationship but are setting clear boundaries on our relationship with Mullvad.
It is clear that you did not even read the text of the short post you are dismissing as "virtue signaling"!
Tor is actually still collaborating with Mullvad and they are no longer "co-branding". They are releasing a statement of their position, which is normal, necessary, and expected.
They clarify that Tor is a political project. Security and privacy are human rights goals which necessarily contend with the political context of surveillance and authoritarianism they exist in. The co-founders support of a far-right party, and the implicit support for surveillance that comes with it, are of significant and immediate concern to those who use Tor and Mullvad.
I mean it's not clear how its supposed to be anything other than virtue signally.
The claim that an expressed belief is principally a kind of signalling means that its content isn't a sincerely held belief by anyone, but the act of expressing such belief serves to signal to some audience a certain non-propositional kind of information. Virtue signalling is a signalling to indicate virtue, and in many practical cases is taken to include tribal loyalty to a particular political project.
Jesus used the phrase, iirc, "praying in the streets":
> And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others
The observation that behaviour signals virtue is as old as the species itself.
Protestations to caring about human rights are, often enough, a modern sort of liberal prayer, practiced in the street or the public internet. And one imagines a vast amount of corp speech exists for signalling purposes (if not virtue,, then eg., to signal strength or growth, or trust). This entire posts exists to signal, it's unclear it expresses any sincere belief whatsoever.
They explain it in the next sentence: "We strongly oppose rhetoric that threatens other human rights and freedoms."
> They explain it in the next sentence: "We strongly oppose rhetoric that threatens other human rights and freedoms."
That's not an explanation. I don't think it's too much of an exaggeration to say everyone supports "human rights and freedoms," they just disagree on what those are.
> They explain it in the next sentence: "We strongly oppose rhetoric that threatens other human rights and freedoms."
Except they are clearly taking a stance in opposition to Swedes' freedom to decide how they want their country to be governed.
Why are they opposing the mere rhetoric and not the ideas themselves? You either support free speech unreservedly, including for your political opposites, or you don't.
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> "We support free speech, unless it's speech we disagree with"
You can defend someone's right to say something while disagreeing with it, not supporting it, and not wanting to be associated with it. By publishing that blog post, Tor isn't attacking free speech; they are participating in it. As are you, when you respond to them, and I, when I respond to you.
> They decided it's more important to virtue signal
I'm always a bit confused by people using the term "virtue signaling". Do you never try to make ethical decisions in your life? If you do, why is it so hard to believe others are, too?
The implication of the term “virtue signaling” is that you’re primarily seeking acclaim (or dodging criticism) by taking a given position, and that your position likely isn’t sincere.
This is pretty common in my experience, along with the inverse of “vice signaling” which you don’t hear about that much.
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Freedom of expression is not a right to be listened to or to be agreed with.
As it happens, Tor's aim is that they don't know who you are or what you say!
> "... unless it's speech we disagree with"
That isn't the standard. The OP addresses an unavoidable, fundamental paradox of freedom: Someone can use their freedom to limit the freedoms of others - if we support that person's freedom, are we supporting freedom or oppression? Are we free to oppress others?
The philosopher Karl Popper famously addressed this issue. Here are a couple more ways to think about it:
* Freedom as a social contract: I support your freedom and you support mine. If I support yours and you take away mine, you've violated the contract and it's void.
* In a society built on freedom, those who use their freedom to take away others' freedom are parasites on society.
Arguably, the only speech not to tolerate is intolerance.
But that's all philosophy. Practically, nobody believes any freedom is absolute. Freedom of speech is revered and in the first amendement in the US Constitution, but nobody thinks it's absolute: you can't slander people, defraud them, threaten them, create dangerous situations (famously, you can't yell 'fire' in a crowded theater), etc.
>create dangerous situations (famously, you can't yell 'fire' in a crowded theater), etc.
Every time someone brings this up, I feel obligated to mention:
1. The phrase came from a supreme court case that ruled an anti-war activist's leaflets were illegal, because it was promoting people to dodge the draft. I doubt many people arguing for free speech restrictions would support this case, even if they agree with the principle.
2. Practically speaking it's no longer relevant because it was overturned with "imminent lawless action"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schenck_v._United_States
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Every time I'm appalled and both surprised and not surprised to see yet another rich CEO or founder be a genuinely awful person supporting causes that hurt people in some way. I guess it's just a prerequisite for the job? Are there CEOs and founders who aren't awful?
Yep, you don't hear about them because what would they announce? Day 10000 of being not-an-asshole?
27 years of being not-an-asshole would be a great achievement to brag about.
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That sounds like you are threatening a named individual with deadly political violence. Your comment cannot be interpreted in any other way.
All speech is equal, but some speech is more equal than others.
Not sure what this is supposed to say; free speech != equal speech.
"All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_Farm
You can learn a lot by reading books.
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If all speech were truly equal, calling for the death of all black people is speech that is equal to calling Israel’s action in Gaza a genocide.
I am not saying the content of the speech is morally equal, but Tor's explicit mission is to make people anonymous and protect speech. The moment you start inspecting it, Tor's mission is negated.
Of course, Tor's partnerships are different than the content distributed through it's network, but I still find it a bit ironic.
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It’s not equal. It’s more equal.
"The Tor Project’s mission is to advance human rights and freedoms." - I might be completely barking up the wrong tree here, but I thought the TOR mission was to allow spies to access the network and hide among all the other non-spy users.
It was and still is funded mostly by the US Naval Research Laboratory. And considering most of the nodes are hosted on American cloud infra, if those companies share with the US Govt in real-time what is connecting in and out then the entire chain can be figured out much of the time without any kind of timing attacks. The regular person using it doesn't get as much of the privacy benefits, but the charade is making it seem like they do.
I know lots of people really believe in TOR - fair play to them. I just know it in my bones it's not as it seems.
From what I recall, talking to one of the Tor founders about this, Tor was created with overseas US military personnel in mind. E.g. A soldier’s location could be compromised through foreign ISPs if they accessed sites like .mil domains directly. Tor was a way of preventing this problem. There were other use cases but this one stood out for me and it was one of the initial ones considered.
Pretty on point with what I'm saying. I remember when Tor first launched and it was definitely framed at the time as for human rights. I absolutely believed all of that for years.
You yourself spoke with the founder about this?
Meh, and yet anyone can run a relay or onion service in a few clicks.
It's the best tool regular people have for privacy without a doubt.
>The regular person using it doesn't get as much of the privacy benefits, but the charade is making it seem like they do.
Just false.
If your model is simply to avoid corporate surveillance and tracking its a fantastic defense.
If your trying to go up against nation states, it never claimed to protect you from that.
'Meh, and yet anyone can run a relay or onion service in a few clicks.' - of course.
'Just false.'
It depends where you are from. The US constitution is supposed to prevent spying on American citizens, but anyone outside of the USA is fair game. Most of the global population is not in the USA (like me).
'If your model is simply to avoid corporate surveillance and tracking its a fantastic defense.' - I host an onion service exactly for that reason, not for my own privacy but to let customers have that with us if they want.
'If your trying to go up against nation states, it never claimed to protect you from that.' - I disagree, it will protect an American spy a treat.
That's a lot of allegations.
> the TOR mission was to allow spies to access the network and hide among all the other non-spy users
Tor is pretty clear about what their mission is, it's at the bottom of the Tor Project homepage https://www.torproject.org: "To advance human rights and freedoms by creating and deploying free and open source anonymity and privacy technologies, supporting their unrestricted availability and use, and furthering their scientific and popular understanding."
Claiming anything else is useless conspiracy thinking without evidence.
> It was and still is funded mostly by the US Naval Research Laboratory
The original idea came from the US Naval Research Laboratory, yes (as a way to mask the origin of messages to hide the command boat in a fleet), but the funding statement is patently false. In 2024, the majority of their government funding ($2.1M out of $2.5) came from the U.S. State Department Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, with the rest of the government money coming from even more innocuous sources. You can find this information on p41 of their IRS form: https://www.torproject.org/static/findoc/2023-2024-TheTorPro... also accessible from their Reports page at https://www.torproject.org/about/reports/
They also clarified that in this more readable post: https://forum.torproject.org/t/transparency-openness-and-our...
Certainly, you can speculate about the motivations of the U.S. State Department Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor and whether that's a front for more undercover objectives, but that front lines up pretty well with the US's (former?) foreign policy of undermining (unfriendly) dictatorial regimes, and Occam's Razor applies.
Ultimately though, the tools that Tor provides can absolutely be abused by bad actors, and ever since Silk Road, I've become convinced that the Tor network is overrun by a wretched hive of scum and villainy, where those morally defensible activities are utterly outnumbered by the criminal ones.
"Claiming anything else is useless conspiracy thinking without evidence."
Using the word "conspiracy" in this conversation about TOR is wild to me.
In a post-Snowden world, it surprises me how anyone wouldn't give reasonable doubt to the THE most interesting and juicy tool linked to the US military post-2001. The tool that people think hides what they are doing and hides who they are.
If there's one thing I know, it's that the US would never in a million years leave a data source untapped or a new NIST crypto standard untampered. Their fingers are in every pie.
> I thought the TOR mission was to allow spies to access the network and hide among all the other non-spy users.
Both things can be true... the original need for the network necessitated the mission of the foundation itself... you can't have a global network that only spies use, or you're not blending in, so you have to make it about a public good that many civilians will also use.
Other systems like I2P, SimpleX, Tribler, Datura etc. take additional steps to mitigate such kinds of Sybil attacks that people talk about against Tor, and new methods are being worked on all the time.
Splitting up your traffic across multiple nodes/circuits/etc. as well as persistent dummy/decoy traffic are some methods I've seen discussed recently.
> if those companies share with the US Govt in real-time
IMO This is a colossal "if" and not something we can realistically determine besides saying "we know it happens sometimes, but certainly not all or even most of the time."
Everyone's threat model is different, and hiding from state-level actors is generally 1. much too complicated to succeed at, and 2. you're probably not that special in the first place that you'd actually be targeted. The privacy community is bursting at the seams with all manner of tinfoil-hat wearers and wild conspiracy theorists that think some dark boogeyman is out to get them.
I'd also like to see a source that proves "most of the nodes are hosted on American cloud infra."
I'd also like to see a source that proves "most of the nodes are hosted on American cloud infra."
I will make a correction. What I should have said is that out of the top 10 networks hosting relays or exit nodes, that close to half have an American presence and that the vast majority 80-90% of relays and exit nodes are spread out within 14 eyes countries - you can see it yourself when you look at the network. When was the last time you looked at where it was connected to and did not see a flag within either 5 eyes, 9 eyes or 14 eyes countries? While that maybe isn't the proof you want, it sure is a meaty coincidence and another reason on top of who funds it and what its purpose is for.
How secure is SimpleX? I saw a lot of tinfoil hat people on Reddit claiming that it's the next coming of Signal.