Do the doctrines of Kopimism cover the sanctity of anonymity?
> From: Eugen Leitl <eugen(a)leitl.org>
> Date: November 29, 2013 at 11:47:48 AM EST
> To: tor-talk(a)lists.torproject.org, Liberation Technologies <liberationtech(a)lists.stanford.edu>, cypherpunks(a)al-qaeda.net, doctrinezero(a)zerostate.is
> Subject: [liberationtech] Group Thinks Anonymity Should Be Baked Into the Internet Itself
> Reply-To: liberationtech <liberationtech(a)lists.stanford.edu>
>
>
> http://www.technologyreview.com/news/521856/group-thinks-anonymity-should-b…
>
> Group Thinks Anonymity Should Be Baked Into the Internet Itself
>
> Following NSA surveillance revelations, talks advance on making the
> privacy-protecting tool Tor an Internet standard.
>
> By David Talbot on November 26, 2013
>
> WHY IT MATTERS
>
> Published reports suggest that Internet traffic is widely spied upon by the
> NSA and other government agencies.
>
> The Internet’s main engineers have asked the architects of Tor—networking
> software designed to make Web browsing private—to consider turning the
> technology into an Internet standard.
>
> If widely adopted, such a standard would make it easy to include the
> technology in consumer and business products ranging from routers to apps.
> This would, in turn, allow far more people to browse the Web without being
> identified by anyone who might be spying on Internet traffic.
>
> If the discussions bear fruit, it could lead to the second major initiative
> of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in response to the mass
> surveillance by the National Security Administration. Already the IETF is
> working to encrypt more of the data that flows between your computer and the
> websites you visit (see “Engineers Plan a Fully Encrypted Internet”).
>
> Collaborating with Tor would add an additional layer of security and privacy.
> When Tor is successfully used, the websites you visit don’t know the true
> address and location of your computer, and anyone watching traffic from your
> computer wouldn’t know where you’re browsing—a distinct layer of protection
> that goes beyond encrypting your communications.
>
> Stephen Farrell, a computer scientist at Trinity College, Dublin, believes
> that forging Tor into a standard that interoperates with other parts of the
> Internet could be better than leaving Tor as a separate tool that requires
> people to take special action to implement. “I think there are benefits that
> might flow in both directions,” he says. “I think other IETF participants
> could learn useful things about protocol design from the Tor people, who’ve
> faced interesting challenges that aren’t often seen in practice. And the Tor
> people might well get interest and involvement from IETF folks who’ve got a
> lot of experience with large-scale systems.”
>
> Andrew Lewman, executive director of Tor, says the group is considering it.
> “We’re basically at the stage of ‘Do we even want to go on a date together?’
> It’s not clear we are going to do it, but it’s worth exploring to see what is
> involved. It adds legitimacy, it adds validation of all the research we’ve
> done,” he says. On the other hand, he adds: “The risks and concerns are that
> it would tie down developers in rehashing everything we’ve done, explaining
> why we made decisions we made. It also opens it up to being weakened,” he
> says, because third-party companies implementing Tor could add their own
> changes.
>
> The IETF is an informal organization of engineers that changes Internet code
> and operates by rough consensus. Internet service providers, companies, and
> websites aren’t required to implement any standards the IETF issues. And even
> if security standards are implemented, they may not be widely deployed. For
> example, years ago the IETF created a standard for encrypting Web traffic
> between your computer and the websites you visit. Although this standard,
> HTTPS, is built into most software for serving Web pages and browsing the
> Web, only banks, e-commerce sites, and a number of big websites like Google
> and Facebook have elected to actually use it. The IETF hopes to make such
> encryption the default for a future Web communications standard known as HTTP
> 2.0.
>
> The Tor Project is a nonprofit group that receives government and private
> funding to produce its software, which is used by law enforcement agencies,
> journalists, and criminals alike. The technology originally grew out of work
> by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory aimed at protecting military users (see
> “Dissent Made Safer”).
>
> When someone installs Tor on his computer and takes other precautions, it
> supplies that computer with a directory of relays, or network points, whose
> owners have volunteered to handle Tor traffic. Tor then ensures that the
> user’s traffic takes extra steps through the Internet. At each stop, the
> previous computer address and routing information get freshly encrypted,
> meaning the final destination sees only the address of the most recent relay,
> and none of the previous ones.
>
> Leaks by Edward Snowden, a former NSA contractor, suggest that circumventing
> Tor was one of the NSA’s goals, and that the agency had had some success (see
> “Anonymity Network Tor Needs a Tune-up to Protect Users from Surveillance”).
> “We are about 10 people, and have multibillion dollar agencies trying to
> break our technology,” Lewman says.
> --
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