Comment by fasterik
4 hours ago
>Tor shouldn't choose sides in political debates.
Privacy, surveillance, and censorship are political debates. According to your logic, Tor shouldn't choose sides on those either.
I don't understand this view. Tor is inherently a political project.
I would counter that it’s (or at least should be) a mission driven project.
That mission might be political - but the politics follow from the mission not the other way around.
The mission I’d personally like out of a product that fits Tor’s space is: the ability to unconditionally communicate securely and privately over the public Internet.
Saying that mission is inherently political, sure, you’re going to exclude people who disagree with the mission. That’s kinda the point.
But saying that the narrow politics of that mission means the organization should be broadened to take additional political stances that would exclude people who otherwise would participate in advancing the mission?
I don’t know how that follows.
The way you raise a point about missions being the basis to politics and then provide the immediate counterpoint someone would make to show that this mission ("everyone should be able to communicate securely and privately") is caused by a political opinion, is strange.
> But saying that the narrow politics of that mission means the organization should be broadened to take additional political stances that would exclude people who otherwise would participate in advancing the mission?
They're not really excluding anyone. If you read the blogpost, they're not even stopping their technological partnership. They are just stopping co-branding themselves to avoid being seen as directly associated with Mullvad. That doesn't exclude anyone. Co-branding is a position of added trust on top of the baseline of being aligned with anyone who shares your views, isn't it expected that an organization might be pickier if it has to sign under another organization's brand?
Projects should only be political in their own field. For example, the FSF should be political in copyright and patent matters, but not military or entitlement spending matters.
Actually "projects" are never political. But the people behind those projects we love and support, can care ffor lots more of political, social, or whatever form of issues or topics.
So they can be political in more things and actually when they make an honest public statement we should be happy since we know clearly what's their standing on important issues of today. I think that should be important to all of us.
I have no issue with the people behind projects speaking politically on whatever they want, if they do so with their own personal voice. My issue is specifically with them doing so with the voice of the project.
Ah yes, the "shut up and dribble" philosophy.