[liberationtech] Use of PRISM corporations by social activists & campaigns

[Jonathan Wilkes]

>From: Yosem Companys <companys at stanford.edu>
>To: Liberation Technologies <liberationtech at lists.stanford.edu> 
>Cc: Charles Lenchner <clenchner at organizing20.org> 
>Sent: Monday, June 10, 2013 2:26 PM
>Subject: [liberationtech] Use of PRISM corporations by social activists & campaigns
 


>From: Charles Lenchner <clenchner at organizing20.org>, the well known sell out and corporate shill from Organizing 2.0

>I'll never give up using FB and gmail. I want the government to know what I'm up to at all times so it's completely transparent and I'll never be suspected of anything.

>Then, if I want to cause mayhem, I'll use all those Tor/darknet/burner phone stuff on the side.

>Switching now would just make me look suspicious!

>Serious revolutionaries need to appear to be cheerful do-gooders. 

Regardless of whether that's a parody or not, it's a technically incompetent statement.  If I understand
it correctly, Tor is freely available by design because the wider the availability the greater the (potential) cover traffic.  I assume this is why the Naval Research Laboratory didn't fund a system that would only provide access to people with certain credentials-- that would remove all cover traffic and threaten to undermine the entire purpose for the system.

That statement also wrongly assumes government intrusion is the only attack vector.  I'm currently migrating from Yahoo Mail not because of the reported actions of a spy agency, but because the _next_ time someone hacks Yahoo Mail's crummy security I don't want to waste any of my time worrying about what data I had stored there and what could be used from it to run a confidence scam on me.

To me, the real tragedy is that there isn't some super-simple tool for running the equivalent of Google Docs using a Tor hidden service.  It has nothing to do with "anonymous mayhem", and everything to do with breaking through NAT's so that I can host my own "cloud" and have control and access over it from anywhere in the world that I can connect my laptop to the internet.  No unwanted changes to the interface, no dropping of unpopular services, just an economy of one that responds to my needs and my needs only.  I know there are plenty of people who want similar control over the tools they use, and they'd happily take the performance hit of Tor for that.  (And for text documents it shouldn't be such a big deal anyway.)

-Jonathan
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.stanford.edu/pipermail/liberationtech/attachments/20130610/dda48350/attachment.html>