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."
Maybe the co-founder of Mullvad sees the potential profit in the increasing popularity of the party because it would make Mullvad increasingly a necessity.
Wikipedia is heavily biased far-left on this topic. Their logic: taking in migrants is not far-left, but sending them back is far-right. That's called political bias. Of course they don't mention their huge crime rate.
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.
> Anyone with at least half a brain working understand that crime rate is the consequence of racism and far right influence.
This theory contradicts the fact that immigrant groups with high crime rate also come from countries with high crime rate, where racism is not a plausible postulate.
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".
I'm confused. Can you point me to the specific policy of this party, or other mainstream "far-right" parties who have a remigration policy that specifically excludes the deportation of white people who were not born there?
ICE has deported thousands of white people under the current administration, for instance. Their removal operations are indiscriminate, not racial. Several white people (some from Canada, some from the UK, some from Ireland) have made headline news after getting picked up by ICE ERO.
You're confused that I accurately described the origins and meaning of the term "remigration"? It is not merely closing borders and deporting immigrants without legal permission to be there. Calling for remigration absolutely is calling for ethnic cleansing. They're not shy about it, except when trying to convince non-racists that it's actually completely reasonable, and will only happen to criminals, the "worst of the worst", and those who haven't assimilated.
The rest is a large pile of missing the point, and bringing up things I did not say.
I did not say any one was doing it. I said people were calling for it.
For the leaders of the Örebro Party in particular, Wikipedia suffices:
> In a podcast segment about second generation immigrants involved in organised crime Allard stated "They will also be forced to leave, even if they are born in Sweden, because they have no natural connection to Sweden. They are not Swedish. They have not been interested in becoming Swedish."
(I am aware that Sweden is _Jus sanguinis_; it is entirely possible that second generation immigrants don't have citizenship; that merely makes it legal. And he does not explicitly make even that limiting argument.)
Note too that ethnicity is narrower than skin color; the lumping together of all European-extraction is a contingent feature of history, and is weaker than you might think. Kicking out non-Swedes would ethnic-cleansing, and would be even if the people being kicked out were white.
Nor does also deporting people for non-ethnic reasons make the rest of a remigration program not ethnic-cleansing. It's not the goal, but it's no big loss to these nationalists, because they're authoritarian race-collectivists willing to cause harm to get those people out.
> Calling for remigration absolutely is calling for ethnic cleansing
Again, I ask for a specific remigration policy that excludes the remigration of white people in the country illegally. This is the prerequisite that would make it a policy based on ethnicity-based deportation.
If it's indiscriminate, it is indiscriminate and therefore not based on ethnic background. Seems to me their explicit policies, both written and in practice, are indiscriminate.
This comment is playing a rhetorical trick, because remigration movements keep calling for the deportation of ethnic minorities who aren't violating any laws or rules. Many even want to specifically revoke the citizenship of ethnic minorities - at which point they'd become "illegals", so in the context of your request it'd still be indiscriminate.
Yes, it should absolutely disqualify the OP.
Even if the RN wasn't called explicitly as I cannot find any French far-right labelled party with a socialist economics. None.
The main one is RN, François Asselineau is maybe the more "lefty compatible" far-right candidate, and he is clearly "right" labelled, not a lefty.
You either are just lying or are profoundly miss informed.
The budget they present on 6 of October is absolutely not social or even support a welfare state. The only thing "socialist-like" is retirement at 62yo, only for people starting to work at 20yo.
The vote at the national assembly state that they are right or far-right oriented.
"One has only to look at the syllabus of every fascist movement to find the major traditionalist thinkers. The Nazi gnosis was nourished by traditionalist, syncretistic, occult elements. The most influential theoretical source of the theories of the new Italian right, Julius Evola, merged the Holy Grail with The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, alchemy with the Holy Roman and Germanic Empire. The very fact that the Italian right, in order to show its open-mindedness, recently broadened its syllabus to include works by De Maistre, Guenon, and Gramsci, is a blatant proof of syncretism.
If you browse in the shelves that, in American bookstores, are labeled as New Age, you can find there even Saint Augustine who, as far as I know, was not a fascist. But combining Saint Augustine and Stonehenge — that is a symptom of Ur-Fascism."
Nope, the Swedish version of AfD is a lot more successful and is already well integrated into the political system (it’s the 3rd largest party in the parliament ).
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.
It is a standard corporate register. If you are an employee responsible for communication at an organization, you must either write like this or take ownership of your work and accept some creative risk.
... However, you often don't receive anything in return for taking that risk, so you end up producing standard corporate PR content.
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?
yeah truly awful CEO. he should advocate for the unregulated flood of foreigners used to replace locals and be exploited as cheap labor like our benevolent and progressive silicon valley idols!
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.
> You either support free speech unreservedly, including for your political opposites, or you don't.
You've never heard statements such as "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."?
That is, you don't draw a real distinction between repeatedly, loudly, and publicly calling someone a cotton-headed slop-spouting pig to whom no one should pay any mind and actively working to ensure that said pig is prohibited from spouting its slop?
> 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.
> "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 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"
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".
> "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.
> 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.
Exactly. Now, who would think that other people's ethical decisions aren't made for sincere reasons?
Many people violate their own supposed principles when not in public view. (Like literally the moment they think they aren’t being watched.) Maybe you haven’t noticed it.
I use the powers of observation and watch actual behavior. If you’re someone who doesn’t outwardly judge people for anything IRL, you end up seeing a lot of crazy shit from people who feel safe showing their worst selves.
> If you’re someone who doesn’t outwardly judge people for anything IRL
Well, you certainly make yourself look like a swell guy. I feel like you're supporting my conclusion: the only reason you think others "virtue signal" is that you extrapolate from your own behavior, not because you have any insight into theirs.
Lol. If I had to guess, you probably misunderstand so completely because you’re fully guilty of the behavior I described, but you’re unwilling or unable to allow yourself to see it. Common defense mechanism.
You don't have a nonjudgmental attitude. What you're describing is a prime example of virtue signaling: you pretend to be nonjudgmental toward people, but secretly judge them.
You're so used to your own behavior that you literally cannot fathom the concept that others might not work like you ("you’re fully guilty of the behavior I described").
I hope you can see that your opinion of others only tells us something about you, not about others. You see "virtue signaling" everywhere because you do it constantly, not because others lack a moral compass and only try to behave well to "signal" something to others. That's you.
No shit I don’t have a nonjudgmental attitude. For one thing I said I was only outwardly nonjudgmental. I also don’t see nonjudgmental attitudes as a good thing, like I already said. I swear it’s like I’m talking to a brick wall here.
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.
I am like bleeding heart anti-military anti-war anti prison industrial complex and military industrial complex
I have exception for Tor (and pretty much only Tor) because of the nature of what an anonymity network is and how it functions it requires everyone to use it independent of gov, background, country etc - and the security of adversary sometimes contributes to secuirty of self - so for instance - if they have vested interest in maintaining anonymity of undercover assets in the gulf or something, it helps human rights activists also, etc
To me it's like one of those universal things - I believe humanity with the power to read and write without exception and to chose who to communicate with, independent of considerations of who is watching / reading etc is a great good. And humans will be human.
So yes some peoples backgrounds mean that is them communicating to do shady shit based in greed, or hatred etc. but it's also simultaneously the ability of person who knows about shady shit to get information to others to prevent etc.
Is Tor able to nullify the great firewall of China?
If not, that means that Tor can be crippled by any authoritarian government, and thus making sure authoritarian parties don't get into power is important.
"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 and fair play to them though, I don't want to argue with those devotees - I just do not buy it and consider it mostly a charade. But I still think it's a useful tool, regardless.
'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.
> 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.
Well, it's definitely not like Signal. The idea of it is to give better metadata privacy. It should be similar content privacy to any other good messenger like Signal.
The developer said he stopped writing code many months ago (IIRC). Idk if this means much but something to think about.
They're getting their third audit right now by Trail of Bits. Maybe it's already done and they're fixing the issues.
The developer keeps getting in arguments with this guy, maqp. Well I suppose maqp is getting in arguments with him. At first I was kind of on the SimpleX dev's side, because maqp came off as angry while he argued and at the same time I didn't really understand the discussion.
But maqp's main critique boils down to the fact that SimpleX's goal and marketing is anonymity, by removing user profiles, removing even random identifiers, but they don't implement Tor by default, so your IP address is an identifier.
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.
The development of onion routing funded by the NRL had a bunch of use cases including the one I mentioned. By the time Tor (The Onion Router) launched, and definitely by the time the Tor Project came along, more general use cases and human rights were a significant part of it.
I did have the chance to attend a talk by one of the cofounders and have a conversation with him afterwards. This was at a math conference a little over a decade ago.
> 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: "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 FUD and allegations.
> 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 message 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/
Obviously, 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, 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.
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?
> While Tor defends free speech, not all speech is equally compatible with our mission.
It's sad to see the back slide. 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. You see the same backsliding when in the Electronic Frontier Foundation. They are a lot more neoliberal now then liberal. Interests over values.
Free speech absolutists can still have opinions, criticize others, and choose who to associate with, without believing that those they criticize should be fined or thrown in jail.
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.
But the question is, if the speaker of vile speech is being persecuted by the powers that be, will said brave "free speech absolutist" NGOs step up or will they be conspicuously absent?
> ...if the speaker of vile speech is being persecuted by the powers that be...
What specifically is being done to persecute this hypothetical pig you refer to? As always, the details matter.
In regards to the Tor Project's public statement that is TFA, they've chosen to stop advertising with Mullvad [0] because they strongly disagree with specific political positions that a Mullvad co-founder has publicly endorsed. They're not backing out of working on the Mullvad Browser because they figure that stopping that work -and losing the new feature testbed and (presumably) the money they get from it- would hurt more people than the implicit endorsement that some folks will see by continuing to work with Mullvad.
[0] ...this is referred to as "proactive co-branding" and "joint promotional activity"...
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.
> In the olden days free speech absolutists would defend all speech short of fires in the cinema.
And ever since the tiki torch holding Nazis in Charlottesville shouting "Jews will not replace us", they've seen where that inevitably leads. If there is no setting acceptable borders, a place will degenerate fast and furiously - that's why you see, for example, even notoriously ultra-libertarian places like 4chan force off all the brony stuff into /mlp [1].
Free speech means freedom from governmental repression, not freedom from being ostracized by society.
> 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.
> 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.
The NSA and the Swedish Secret Service let the Tor and Mullvad developers know that a sternly worded letter would be preferred over severing all relations. They need their honeypots to cooperate!
> 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.
Freedom of speech does not equate to freedom from 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.
> 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.
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,
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.
>The only threshold should be calls for violence or murder.
Not very absolute though, and why are calls for violence somehow different from other icky things like sharing AI-generated nude images or selling people dangerous weapons?
I respect the moxie of the free speech absolutists and I'm glad there are some of them in the world. I personally tend to think things are a bit more complex than that, but if you're going to be an absolutist, then be an absolutist and allow all speech, including calls for violence.
Ah yeah, like Voltaire said "I have no opinion about what you've said, that would mean I'm against free speech, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
You say 'absolute' and then the very next sentence you add a qualifier, and the qualifier isn't all that far distant from the ones you say you disagree with.
Put 'violence and murder' next to 'threatening human rights and freedoms' and the former is not a great distance from the later. (having said that, the latter probably has a lot of 'definition argument' within it).
"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."
The paradox of tolerance: if one wishes to live in a tolerant society, then one should be tolerant of all speech and actions except those that are themselves intolerant.
Neat idea, but as usual, the real world is more complex than any one idea.
It’s not double think. Free speech is about defending other people’s right to speak, not what they say. It opposes the Örebro Party’s / Mullvad cofounder’s opinions, not their right to say them. The network Tor created is literally a place where speech is incredibly hard to censor. Choosing what degree to work with another company is not about the right to free speech.
Some people here are defending Mullvad's political position. But the point is that a project devoted to free speech as such shouldn't be associated with a political, ideological group that favors one set of publicly presented ideas and strongly condemns another set.
The danger is that if the Tor network gets very dependent on Mullvad, then Mullvad might pressure it to make the network censor ideas it doesn't like.
> The danger is that if the Tor network gets very dependent on Mullvad, then Mullvad might pressure it to make the network censor ideas it doesn't like.
glances over at their supporters page [0]... I mean, that's not literally impossible.
While it is true that Mullvad supports at "Shallot Onion" -and has since mid 2023- [1] and "Shallot Onion" is Tor Project's highest support tier, we don't know how much Mullvad is paying. Six years ago, the smallest amount one could donate to get into that tier was 100k USD [2]. In contrast, just one of their eleven (or twelve, depending on how you count the two listed US State Department entities) supporters provided 500k USD per year in 2022->2024, and "committed" to providing 750k USD per year in 2025->2027... until -one assumes- DOGE canceled that grant in its "efficiency" sweeps.
FUTO is another of the eleven-ish entities on that page. While FUTO doesn't seem to mention how much it granted to the Tor Project, their grants page [3] claims that they've granted five million USD to twenty entities in their "Legendary Grants" -er- program, for an average of 250k USD per entity.
There's a lot that we don't know about the details of the financial situation of the Tor Project... but while it's possible that they become captured by Mullvad's money, it seems unlikely to me.
Oh, rad! I had forgotten that that information would appear on publicly-accessible tax documents. Thanks for digging that up. How did you locate it? Punch in something like "Tor Project 990 2025" into a search engine, or were you already aware of this GuideStar organization?
I see that the 1.5 million USD State Department grant is listed on that return. I do hope that they weren't obligated to return that. The Award History section here [0] suggests that they were, but I don't know much at all about how these sorts of grants work.
Anyway. This is where Tor Project seems to officially publish their tax documents [1], but I can only find docs up to 2023->2024...
Notable is that in 2023->2024 (the year prior to the document you link to) Mullvad's funding was 1.4 million USD, whereas in 2024->2025, Mullvad's funding was 306 thousand USD. In that year, the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency provided nearly twice the funding that Mullvad did! Perhaps Mullvad donated a enormously large amount of money in 2025->2026, but, yeah, the numbers don't support the "the Tor Project will start censoring because Mullvad is paying them so much" story.
> How did you locate it? Punch in something like "Tor Project 990 2025" into a search engine, or were you already aware of this GuideStar organization?
I searched "tor 990", found the same [1] you did with stale data, and knew from past experience I could find the latest on GuideStar. 990s are really useful when doing due diligence on non-profits before making donations. In an ideal world, they'd be easy to find directly on irs.gov, but, alas.
> Some people here are defending Mullvad's political position.
It is not Mullvad's political position. It is the political position of one of its co-founders, using his own money. The other co-founder openly disagrees with that position.
Personally, I feel _much_ better about relying on a company whose two co-CEOs have diametrically opposed political stance, than I would about a company with a singular one.
> ... a project devoted to free speech as such shouldn't be associated with a political, ideological group that favors one set of publicly presented ideas and strongly condemns another set.
The Tor project heavily relies on US government funds since its beginning.
The US government trivially favors one set of publicly presented ideas and strongly condemns another.
You don't deny that if a donor is ideologically oriented, then there is a danger that it will pressure Tor to engage in censorship. I assume that is because you know you don't have any good arguments that this would not happen, just that it is difficult to avoid having ideologically-oriented donors.
I am curious: Why would you assume that I am intellectually dishonest? Why not assume good faith?
As for the actual argument: There are no ideology-free actors. Therefore, the best way for an organization to become more independent is to reduce its reliance on a single source (or cluster) of funding by diversifying its financial backing.
The more backers who are not closely aligned between each other, the more independent the organization is. Conversely, the more the new backers share the same alignment, the more they tend to act similarly, reducing the benefit of the split.
Nobody cares. I’m so tired of people pushing this slop on us. I don’t care what meaningless controversy you’ve manufactured this month. There are so many real problems that need solving, we don’t need more redditisms.
Yeah, completely insane "free speech" absolutist who are also completely fine with punishing people who supposedly don't share "western values" by taking away their citizenship and expelling them.
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[ 1.3 ms ] story [ 16.7 ms ] threadWhen 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.
This is very close to magic dirt theory -- I bring a horse into a pond, does it start acting like a duck?
This theory contradicts the fact that immigrant groups with high crime rate also come from countries with high crime rate, where racism is not a plausible postulate.
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".
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.
ICE has deported thousands of white people under the current administration, for instance. Their removal operations are indiscriminate, not racial. Several white people (some from Canada, some from the UK, some from Ireland) have made headline news after getting picked up by ICE ERO.
The rest is a large pile of missing the point, and bringing up things I did not say. I did not say any one was doing it. I said people were calling for it.
For the leaders of the Örebro Party in particular, Wikipedia suffices: > In a podcast segment about second generation immigrants involved in organised crime Allard stated "They will also be forced to leave, even if they are born in Sweden, because they have no natural connection to Sweden. They are not Swedish. They have not been interested in becoming Swedish."
(I am aware that Sweden is _Jus sanguinis_; it is entirely possible that second generation immigrants don't have citizenship; that merely makes it legal. And he does not explicitly make even that limiting argument.)
Note too that ethnicity is narrower than skin color; the lumping together of all European-extraction is a contingent feature of history, and is weaker than you might think. Kicking out non-Swedes would ethnic-cleansing, and would be even if the people being kicked out were white.
Nor does also deporting people for non-ethnic reasons make the rest of a remigration program not ethnic-cleansing. It's not the goal, but it's no big loss to these nationalists, because they're authoritarian race-collectivists willing to cause harm to get those people out.
Again, I ask for a specific remigration policy that excludes the remigration of white people in the country illegally. This is the prerequisite that would make it a policy based on ethnicity-based deportation.
If it's indiscriminate, it is indiscriminate and therefore not based on ethnic background. Seems to me their explicit policies, both written and in practice, are indiscriminate.
The main one is RN, François Asselineau is maybe the more "lefty compatible" far-right candidate, and he is clearly "right" labelled, not a lefty.
The budget they present on 6 of October is absolutely not social or even support a welfare state. The only thing "socialist-like" is retirement at 62yo, only for people starting to work at 20yo.
The vote at the national assembly state that they are right or far-right oriented.
- https://www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/2026/10/08/au-rn-un-ser... - https://datan.fr/groupes/legislature-17/rn
Like the issue of the grooming gangs in the UK
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...
"One has only to look at the syllabus of every fascist movement to find the major traditionalist thinkers. The Nazi gnosis was nourished by traditionalist, syncretistic, occult elements. The most influential theoretical source of the theories of the new Italian right, Julius Evola, merged the Holy Grail with The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, alchemy with the Holy Roman and Germanic Empire. The very fact that the Italian right, in order to show its open-mindedness, recently broadened its syllabus to include works by De Maistre, Guenon, and Gramsci, is a blatant proof of syncretism.
If you browse in the shelves that, in American bookstores, are labeled as New Age, you can find there even Saint Augustine who, as far as I know, was not a fascist. But combining Saint Augustine and Stonehenge — that is a symptom of Ur-Fascism."
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?
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.
... However, you often don't receive anything in return for taking that risk, so you end up producing standard corporate PR content.
Is this “speak of the devil and his ears shall burn” (I.e. do you feel attacked by this statement?)
"We support free speech, unless it's speech we disagree with"
They decided it's more important to virtue signal their political ideology than actually working toward a shared goal of security and privacy.
You've never heard statements such as "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."?
That is, you don't draw a real distinction between repeatedly, loudly, and publicly calling someone a cotton-headed slop-spouting pig to whom no one should pay any mind and actively working to ensure that said pig is prohibited from spouting its slop?
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.
Except they are clearly taking a stance in opposition to Swedes' freedom to decide how they want their country to be governed.
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 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.
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
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".
As it happens, Tor's aim is that they don't know who you are or what you say!
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?
This is pretty common in my experience, along with the inverse of “vice signaling” which you don’t hear about that much.
Exactly. Now, who would think that other people's ethical decisions aren't made for sincere reasons?
Well, you certainly make yourself look like a swell guy. I feel like you're supporting my conclusion: the only reason you think others "virtue signal" is that you extrapolate from your own behavior, not because you have any insight into theirs.
You're so used to your own behavior that you literally cannot fathom the concept that others might not work like you ("you’re fully guilty of the behavior I described").
I hope you can see that your opinion of others only tells us something about you, not about others. You see "virtue signaling" everywhere because you do it constantly, not because others lack a moral compass and only try to behave well to "signal" something to others. That's you.
It's "free speech", not "full agreement".
Which is what makes it the hollow virtue signaling I said it was. I never claimed they were being censored.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_Farm
You can learn a lot by reading books.
I have exception for Tor (and pretty much only Tor) because of the nature of what an anonymity network is and how it functions it requires everyone to use it independent of gov, background, country etc - and the security of adversary sometimes contributes to secuirty of self - so for instance - if they have vested interest in maintaining anonymity of undercover assets in the gulf or something, it helps human rights activists also, etc
To me it's like one of those universal things - I believe humanity with the power to read and write without exception and to chose who to communicate with, independent of considerations of who is watching / reading etc is a great good. And humans will be human.
So yes some peoples backgrounds mean that is them communicating to do shady shit based in greed, or hatred etc. but it's also simultaneously the ability of person who knows about shady shit to get information to others to prevent etc.
If not, that means that Tor can be crippled by any authoritarian government, and thus making sure authoritarian parties don't get into power is important.
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 and fair play to them though, I don't want to argue with those devotees - I just do not buy it and consider it mostly a charade. But I still think it's a useful tool, regardless.
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.
'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.
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 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.
The developer said he stopped writing code many months ago (IIRC). Idk if this means much but something to think about.
They're getting their third audit right now by Trail of Bits. Maybe it's already done and they're fixing the issues.
The developer keeps getting in arguments with this guy, maqp. Well I suppose maqp is getting in arguments with him. At first I was kind of on the SimpleX dev's side, because maqp came off as angry while he argued and at the same time I didn't really understand the discussion.
But maqp's main critique boils down to the fact that SimpleX's goal and marketing is anonymity, by removing user profiles, removing even random identifiers, but they don't implement Tor by default, so your IP address is an identifier.
https://discuss.privacyguides.net/t/simplex-workflow/40646
https://discuss.privacyguides.net/t/how-come-no-anonymous-me...
https://discuss.privacyguides.net/t/2026-instant-messenger-t...
https://discuss.privacyguides.net/t/simplex-vs-cwtch-who-is-...
You yourself spoke with the founder about this?
I did have the chance to attend a talk by one of the cofounders and have a conversation with him afterwards. This was at a math conference a little over a decade ago.
> 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: "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 FUD and allegations.
> 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 message 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...
Obviously, 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, 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.
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.
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.
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.
/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?
It's sad to see the back slide. 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. You see the same backsliding when in the Electronic Frontier Foundation. They are a lot more neoliberal now then liberal. Interests over values.
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.
What specifically is being done to persecute this hypothetical pig you refer to? As always, the details matter.
In regards to the Tor Project's public statement that is TFA, they've chosen to stop advertising with Mullvad [0] because they strongly disagree with specific political positions that a Mullvad co-founder has publicly endorsed. They're not backing out of working on the Mullvad Browser because they figure that stopping that work -and losing the new feature testbed and (presumably) the money they get from it- would hurt more people than the implicit endorsement that some folks will see by continuing to work with Mullvad.
[0] ...this is referred to as "proactive co-branding" and "joint promotional activity"...
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.
And ever since the tiki torch holding Nazis in Charlottesville shouting "Jews will not replace us", they've seen where that inevitably leads. If there is no setting acceptable borders, a place will degenerate fast and furiously - that's why you see, for example, even notoriously ultra-libertarian places like 4chan force off all the brony stuff into /mlp [1].
Free speech means freedom from governmental repression, not freedom from being ostracized by society.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki//mlp/
Thanks for the shout-out Cider! :)
(A bit of a tangent) Ever been a bitcoin core contributor before? I have seen your tag on in the commit log before..
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)
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.
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?
Mullvad browser is my favorite browser, and it's tor browser minus connection to tor.
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.
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.
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.
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,
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.
Not very absolute though, and why are calls for violence somehow different from other icky things like sharing AI-generated nude images or selling people dangerous weapons?
I respect the moxie of the free speech absolutists and I'm glad there are some of them in the world. I personally tend to think things are a bit more complex than that, but if you're going to be an absolutist, then be an absolutist and allow all speech, including calls for violence.
you disagree with freedom of association?
Put 'violence and murder' next to 'threatening human rights and freedoms' and the former is not a great distance from the later. (having said that, the latter probably has a lot of 'definition argument' within it).
Insults should not be allowed. But then, the free speech is threatened. What do you do?
Posting a message asking people to set fire to someone’s house, also not ok.
Where do _you_ set the limit?
Double think.
Neat idea, but as usual, the real world is more complex than any one idea.
The danger is that if the Tor network gets very dependent on Mullvad, then Mullvad might pressure it to make the network censor ideas it doesn't like.
glances over at their supporters page [0]... I mean, that's not literally impossible.
While it is true that Mullvad supports at "Shallot Onion" -and has since mid 2023- [1] and "Shallot Onion" is Tor Project's highest support tier, we don't know how much Mullvad is paying. Six years ago, the smallest amount one could donate to get into that tier was 100k USD [2]. In contrast, just one of their eleven (or twelve, depending on how you count the two listed US State Department entities) supporters provided 500k USD per year in 2022->2024, and "committed" to providing 750k USD per year in 2025->2027... until -one assumes- DOGE canceled that grant in its "efficiency" sweeps.
FUTO is another of the eleven-ish entities on that page. While FUTO doesn't seem to mention how much it granted to the Tor Project, their grants page [3] claims that they've granted five million USD to twenty entities in their "Legendary Grants" -er- program, for an average of 250k USD per entity.
There's a lot that we don't know about the details of the financial situation of the Tor Project... but while it's possible that they become captured by Mullvad's money, it seems unlikely to me.
[0] <https://www.torproject.org/about/supporters/>
[1] <https://mullvad.net/en/blog/2023/3/3/mullvad-becomes-highest...>
[2] <https://archive.torproject.org/websites/lists.torproject.org...>
[3] <https://futo.tech/grants>
Yes we do; it's listed on Tor's IRS Form 990. $306,225 in 2025.
https://pdf.guidestar.org/PDF_Images/2025/208/096/2025-20809...
I see that the 1.5 million USD State Department grant is listed on that return. I do hope that they weren't obligated to return that. The Award History section here [0] suggests that they were, but I don't know much at all about how these sorts of grants work.
Anyway. This is where Tor Project seems to officially publish their tax documents [1], but I can only find docs up to 2023->2024...
Notable is that in 2023->2024 (the year prior to the document you link to) Mullvad's funding was 1.4 million USD, whereas in 2024->2025, Mullvad's funding was 306 thousand USD. In that year, the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency provided nearly twice the funding that Mullvad did! Perhaps Mullvad donated a enormously large amount of money in 2025->2026, but, yeah, the numbers don't support the "the Tor Project will start censoring because Mullvad is paying them so much" story.
Again, thanks for digging up that tax return.
[0] <https://www.usaspending.gov/award/ASST_NON_2534285_049#award...>
[1] <https://www.torproject.org/about/reports/>
I searched "tor 990", found the same [1] you did with stale data, and knew from past experience I could find the latest on GuideStar. 990s are really useful when doing due diligence on non-profits before making donations. In an ideal world, they'd be easy to find directly on irs.gov, but, alas.
It is not Mullvad's political position. It is the political position of one of its co-founders, using his own money. The other co-founder openly disagrees with that position.
Personally, I feel _much_ better about relying on a company whose two co-CEOs have diametrically opposed political stance, than I would about a company with a singular one.
And where do you think "his own money" comes from? Mullvad.
The Tor project heavily relies on US government funds since its beginning.
The US government trivially favors one set of publicly presented ideas and strongly condemns another.
As for the actual argument: There are no ideology-free actors. Therefore, the best way for an organization to become more independent is to reduce its reliance on a single source (or cluster) of funding by diversifying its financial backing.
The more backers who are not closely aligned between each other, the more independent the organization is. Conversely, the more the new backers share the same alignment, the more they tend to act similarly, reducing the benefit of the split.
This is a fruitful and well studied concept: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_dependence_theory
That’s rich coming from an organisation with strong ties to the US ‘intelligence’ community.
https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-secret-history-of-tor...