Don't be too quick to dismiss this harassment as part of the gamergate-style nonsense that has been going on as of late. This type of thing is typical of the frat boy intelligence community. It's considered the height of their tradecraft to anonymously harass opponents with facile mockery and threats. Recall the FBI's campaign against Dr. Martin Luther King: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/11/fbis-suicide-letter-dr...
It really has nothing to do with gamergate, except I suppose insofar as being subjected to your own harassment might give you solidarity with other people who have been harassed.
It has nothing to do with that, and there's no evidence to back up the claim that gamergate is a harassment campaign, which seems to be what you are implying. Here's an actual, statistical network analysis:
You've failed to understand my point, which is that this is likely state sponsored harassment. I only mentioned gamergate as an example of pointless trolling, which this incident might not be.
We have decided that it is not enough for us to work to protect the world from snoops and censors; we must also stand up to protect one another from harassment.
And with that, they've moved from being a dumb pipe to being a force for censorship. Way to go folks. :(
The big problem we see with the internet, and basically any sort of truly open point-to-point communication system that is truly unbiased, is that means that people are able to talk to whomever they want.
True, free, and open communication, with all that that implies.
Personally, I think the only technological solution to this is to make it expensive enough to send messages that people won't just go and harass for the lulz. One could even imagine a system where, perhaps using some kind of bitcoin analogue, additional traffic to a user becomes increasingly "expensive" unless given specific rebates by the recipient--in effect, the more messages a user gets, the more expensive it is to message them, unless they give you permission to do so.
As for non-tech solutions, people need to come to terms with the fact that others may say terrible and hurtful things to them, and they need to have the fortitude to deal with it or ignore it (and that's not easy, but it's essential if you want to be a responsible adult that encourages freedom in today's world).
And with that, they've moved from being a dumb pipe to being a force for censorship.
This has nothing to do with censorship. It doesn't attempt to make harassment impossible or illegal. It's a social strategy: you can choose to harass people online, or you can choose to be friends with the Tor developers, but you can't do both.
For that matter, harassment is also a social strategy to discourage unwanted activity: you can choose to be a high-profile woman online, or you can choose not to have tons of strangers hate you, but you can't do both. So if this Tor statement somehow was censorship, harassment would be censorship as well.
And so would lots of other things people do every day. We're social animals; we do things to encourage or discourage social participation that we like or don't like. If you have stinky shoes, we stand farther away. If you say shitty things to women, you can't be friends with the Tor developers. It's not censorship, it's freedom of choice.
people need to come to terms with the fact that others may say terrible and hurtful things to them, and they need to have the fortitude to deal with it or ignore it
If you need people to do that, you have a problem, because it is not going to happen. No snark here: if your plan for encouraging freedom depends on people not walking away from harassment, it is an unworkable plan.
If you walk into a bar and everyone shouts terrible things at you, you are not going to "deal with it or ignore it"; you are going to leave. Right now big parts of the internet are like that for (e.g.) women: a bar they walk into, get terrible things shouted at them, and leave.
The Tor devs here are saying, metaphorically, "hey, cut it out, man. You're making this bar suck for everyone." To me, that's a responsible way to encourage freedom in today's world, and more people should do the same.
The Tor devs are saying "Hey, somebody has been harassing one of our members, and we're going to do something about it, concretely, and we write tools, but that's not enough." So, a casual reading suggests that they are intending to do something beyond mere blogging to help their friend. Such an action, unless it's just counter-harassment, could well be censorship. That's how I read their post. And no, it's not a good thing that their friend is being harassed.
Basically, as I read it, their post was either feel-good me-too blog support, or it was a declaration of intent to do something, the nature of the problem in turn suggesting censorship or mechanisms for censorship.
The whole "If you need people to have thick skins, well, that's a problem" attitude just isn't supported by the tech we're working with.
Fact: It is possible to send a direct message from one person to another without any significant intermediary (via email, twitter, etc.). This is freakin' awesome.
Fact: Some percentage of communications sent will be negative or offensive.
Fact: We can either stop offensive communications in transit, or we can ignore them at receipt. We can't stop them being transmitted without creating a mechanism for immediate de facto censorship (hell, consider shadowbans in HN for an example of this).
Fact: If we choose to stop offensive communications in transit, we are enabling the stopping of any communications in transit. The same software that lets us drop messages that say "kill all women"--or some other ghastly comment--is the same software that lets us drop messages that say "save all women". To pretend otherwise is willfully ignorant.
So, it follows (to me, at any rate) that the only way to prevent the installation of such apparatus is to handle discarding messages at the point of reception--and that means being able to ignore or filter out things we disagree with without calling for some central authority to protect us.
I even suggested a nice area of exploration for decentralized handling of that kind of spamming, but nobody cares about that--they just disagree with something else and flag to the bottom of the page. There's your system in action, by the way.
What exactly does this mean? Are there new centralized control mechanisms in the works for Tor? This seems like a really bad idea TBH. I don't want my privacy tools to come with some strangely ambiguous "political" feeling sentiment. Focus is the key to success and this doesn't seem like it.
I really hope this blog is only talking about Tor the community and not Tor the technology. I'm pretty sure it's impossible to ban people who are harassing others without storing some identity information, which completely defeats the purpose of Tor.
I don't think this is anything other than a public condemnation of the people who use anonymity to harass people.
>This declaration is not the last word, but a beginning: We will not tolerate harassment of our people. We are working within our community to devise ways to concretely support people who suffer from online harassment; this statement is part of that discussion. We hope it will contribute to the larger public conversation about online harassment and we encourage other organizations to sign on to it or write one of their own.
Key word is "declaration". I don't think this will effect the tor technology in any way.
This isn't a technological change - they're just publicly stating that members of the community are being harassed (especially women), and that's not OK.
So it's not de-anonymisation, it's calling out bad behaviour that is often ignored (because it's nicer to pretend it's not an issue).
Thinking about it, I'll concede that it is an ideology. One I'm proud to hold and I think is very tech friendly and progressive. I'll restate it: I think tech should be tech. I don't want privacy tools to contain censorship mechanisms because I believe in free speech.
So, just more food for thought: this ideology (that it's bad to look at your tech through a feminist lens, or any other random social lens) tends to be a conservative force, not a progressive one.
Tech has to be built for someone. You build for people you (probably) assume have eyes and ears and hands and written language and a financial system and a predictable reward mechanism and a notion of privacy and on and on and on. The only thing that makes a product "good" or "bad" is its interaction with a massive stack of assumptions you're making about the user.
But you only know like 0.000002% of the possible users of your product. So really you're extrapolating wildly from a tiny set of clues about your user, based on signals sent to you by your culture. (Where "culture" is just the set of stuff that filters through to you about the people around you who you don't know personally.) And that culture holds some people to be more "normal" than others. Consider (as just some examples) that test subjects start to see a crowd as half women when it's much less than half. A movie poster with women on it is intended only for women; a poster with men on it is for everyone. A movie poster with only black people is intended only for black people; a poster with white people is for everyone ...
So the product you build is based on a dirty signal -- it incorporates a massive stack of assumptions about the user, derived from a culture that you know is lying to you about what a normal person is. If you build for your internal idea of a "normal" user, letting tech be tech, then you reinforce whatever happened to be handed to you without realizing you're doing it. That's why this is a conservative ideology.
"Feminism" in this context is a progressive tool -- it's a way to look at your product with fresh eyes. How do anonymity tools look if we assume that all users are equally important, focusing on the experience of men vs. women? Huh, it seems that the user base includes a significant number of men who are hateful toward women, and that has a big impact on who participates in anonymous forums and how men and women experience them. Now we have a lot of different options for dealing with that (censorship being only one, and obviously not one the Tor project would choose). Before we* used this lens, our only option was to ignore it and preserve the status quo.
Other "-isms" are just other tools. Anything that your culture cares too much or too little about -- and therefore tends to lie to you about -- is a possible lens to learn about users you're ignoring, because your mental model of "normal" doesn't match reality.
(* Note I'm not at all affiliated with Tor, just using "we" generally here.)
I agree with what you're saying, but I'm skeptical about how
"significant" the "number of men who are hateful toward women" really is. It's hard to tell a troll from a misogynist. I've seen a lot of assumptions that because the victim is female, and the harassment contains sexist language, that the harasser is therefore a misogynist. Or that the harassment is because the victim is female (as opposed to something she said). But when the troll's intent is to offend, obviously he will use language to that effect.
I see your point, but I guess I don't see why it matters. Like, let's say Person A says horrible stuff because he hates women, and Person B says the same horrible stuff because he likes hurting people and the person he wants to hurt is a woman. And let's say I have a crystal ball that tells me which is which. What do I do with that information?
It sounds like you think that trolls are not hateful towards women because they don't 'mean' the hateful things they say and do. I disagree - I don't care what you 'really believe', if you do and say hateful things towards someone then you are hateful to them and you should be counted in the group.
It also includes just as significant a number of women who are hateful towards men as evidenced by how men trying to talk about hate towards men get shouted down. My point is, if we're going to be against hatred we can't pretend it all goes one way.
> Why is this tagged with "feminism"? I'm really uncomfortable with that. I don't want ideology (of any kind except for my own implicitly regressive one) in my technology.
I see three different top-level comments suggesting that this post is an oblique announcement of some kind of censorship or banning system being developed for the Tor software. It is clearly nothing of the sort, and Tor developers value the system far too much to try to shoehorn a backdoor into it. Respond to it for what it is - a statement of social principles.
I wouldn't say "clearly". They make reference to doing something about harassment but give no outline what that might be. The post is tagged feminism. Believe it or not, not everyone supports this type of feminism. I'm not comfortable with Tor being so overtly political.
No. First of all you're being pretty rude. Secondly, I don't want ANY pecking order in Tor. They should just focus on making privacy tools and leave the unrelated political messaging aside.
You are posting an unpopular position, and are going to get flamed for it by people who won't articulate why they think you're wrong.
For what it's worth, I think you're right about the common-carrier argument. If that's not the argument you're making, disregard my support.
A lot of these folks, in their reasonable zeal to prevent somebody on the internet having their feelings hurt or being made to feel scared, are ignoring the global costs to their chosen fuck-you-got-mine strategies of selective communications. A minority would be even happy to let, say, a misogynist with a cure for cancer be panned or banned irrespective of their other positive qualities. They can be hard to reason with.
It's difficult, and it's why I think a project like Tor should stay out of polarizing political movements. The reason I can't support feminism (outside the scope of this article but relevant to the discussion) is not the end goal of equality for men and women (of course any reasonable person would want that!) but the tactics of baseless accusations, and silencing the opposition. All disagreement becomes "harassment", all divergent opinions are labeled regressive. Look no further than this thread, people that don't agree with Tor's move are down voted to oblivion or subject to personal attacks. This style of aggressive, speech quelching rhetoric is extra dangerous when applied to a tool like Tor IMO.
These are the kind of people who think that telling 13 year old kids they shouldn't send death threats on the internet is the same thing as political censorship. I wouldn't expect a level of reading comprehension much above that of a 13 year old.
42 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 107 ms ] threadhttp://charon.persephoneslair.org/~andrea/pandorasts/jeremy_...
It really has nothing to do with gamergate, except I suppose insofar as being subjected to your own harassment might give you solidarity with other people who have been harassed.
http://pando.com/2014/11/14/tor-smear/
http://chrisvoncsefalvay.com/2014/12/07/Gamergate.html
The only issue I have with the Tor statement is, who actually thinks harassment is a good thing, except sadistic individuals?
It's a false dichotomy. The troll they're referring to was pretty pathetic.
I can't wait until this outrage culture fad is over and we can collectively move on to more interesting things.
Imagine if people called your phone all the time to insult you. You _could_ turn it off, but then how would your friends and family join you?
It's rare that harrassing gets to that point, but when it does you can't just turn away and ignore it.
And with that, they've moved from being a dumb pipe to being a force for censorship. Way to go folks. :(
The big problem we see with the internet, and basically any sort of truly open point-to-point communication system that is truly unbiased, is that means that people are able to talk to whomever they want.
True, free, and open communication, with all that that implies.
Personally, I think the only technological solution to this is to make it expensive enough to send messages that people won't just go and harass for the lulz. One could even imagine a system where, perhaps using some kind of bitcoin analogue, additional traffic to a user becomes increasingly "expensive" unless given specific rebates by the recipient--in effect, the more messages a user gets, the more expensive it is to message them, unless they give you permission to do so.
As for non-tech solutions, people need to come to terms with the fact that others may say terrible and hurtful things to them, and they need to have the fortitude to deal with it or ignore it (and that's not easy, but it's essential if you want to be a responsible adult that encourages freedom in today's world).
This has nothing to do with censorship. It doesn't attempt to make harassment impossible or illegal. It's a social strategy: you can choose to harass people online, or you can choose to be friends with the Tor developers, but you can't do both.
For that matter, harassment is also a social strategy to discourage unwanted activity: you can choose to be a high-profile woman online, or you can choose not to have tons of strangers hate you, but you can't do both. So if this Tor statement somehow was censorship, harassment would be censorship as well.
And so would lots of other things people do every day. We're social animals; we do things to encourage or discourage social participation that we like or don't like. If you have stinky shoes, we stand farther away. If you say shitty things to women, you can't be friends with the Tor developers. It's not censorship, it's freedom of choice.
people need to come to terms with the fact that others may say terrible and hurtful things to them, and they need to have the fortitude to deal with it or ignore it
If you need people to do that, you have a problem, because it is not going to happen. No snark here: if your plan for encouraging freedom depends on people not walking away from harassment, it is an unworkable plan.
If you walk into a bar and everyone shouts terrible things at you, you are not going to "deal with it or ignore it"; you are going to leave. Right now big parts of the internet are like that for (e.g.) women: a bar they walk into, get terrible things shouted at them, and leave.
The Tor devs here are saying, metaphorically, "hey, cut it out, man. You're making this bar suck for everyone." To me, that's a responsible way to encourage freedom in today's world, and more people should do the same.
Basically, as I read it, their post was either feel-good me-too blog support, or it was a declaration of intent to do something, the nature of the problem in turn suggesting censorship or mechanisms for censorship.
The whole "If you need people to have thick skins, well, that's a problem" attitude just isn't supported by the tech we're working with.
Fact: It is possible to send a direct message from one person to another without any significant intermediary (via email, twitter, etc.). This is freakin' awesome.
Fact: Some percentage of communications sent will be negative or offensive.
Fact: We can either stop offensive communications in transit, or we can ignore them at receipt. We can't stop them being transmitted without creating a mechanism for immediate de facto censorship (hell, consider shadowbans in HN for an example of this).
Fact: If we choose to stop offensive communications in transit, we are enabling the stopping of any communications in transit. The same software that lets us drop messages that say "kill all women"--or some other ghastly comment--is the same software that lets us drop messages that say "save all women". To pretend otherwise is willfully ignorant.
So, it follows (to me, at any rate) that the only way to prevent the installation of such apparatus is to handle discarding messages at the point of reception--and that means being able to ignore or filter out things we disagree with without calling for some central authority to protect us.
I even suggested a nice area of exploration for decentralized handling of that kind of spamming, but nobody cares about that--they just disagree with something else and flag to the bottom of the page. There's your system in action, by the way.
>This declaration is not the last word, but a beginning: We will not tolerate harassment of our people. We are working within our community to devise ways to concretely support people who suffer from online harassment; this statement is part of that discussion. We hope it will contribute to the larger public conversation about online harassment and we encourage other organizations to sign on to it or write one of their own.
Key word is "declaration". I don't think this will effect the tor technology in any way.
So it's not de-anonymisation, it's calling out bad behaviour that is often ignored (because it's nicer to pretend it's not an issue).
That too is an ideology, and it's not a trivial one.
Tech has to be built for someone. You build for people you (probably) assume have eyes and ears and hands and written language and a financial system and a predictable reward mechanism and a notion of privacy and on and on and on. The only thing that makes a product "good" or "bad" is its interaction with a massive stack of assumptions you're making about the user.
But you only know like 0.000002% of the possible users of your product. So really you're extrapolating wildly from a tiny set of clues about your user, based on signals sent to you by your culture. (Where "culture" is just the set of stuff that filters through to you about the people around you who you don't know personally.) And that culture holds some people to be more "normal" than others. Consider (as just some examples) that test subjects start to see a crowd as half women when it's much less than half. A movie poster with women on it is intended only for women; a poster with men on it is for everyone. A movie poster with only black people is intended only for black people; a poster with white people is for everyone ...
So the product you build is based on a dirty signal -- it incorporates a massive stack of assumptions about the user, derived from a culture that you know is lying to you about what a normal person is. If you build for your internal idea of a "normal" user, letting tech be tech, then you reinforce whatever happened to be handed to you without realizing you're doing it. That's why this is a conservative ideology.
"Feminism" in this context is a progressive tool -- it's a way to look at your product with fresh eyes. How do anonymity tools look if we assume that all users are equally important, focusing on the experience of men vs. women? Huh, it seems that the user base includes a significant number of men who are hateful toward women, and that has a big impact on who participates in anonymous forums and how men and women experience them. Now we have a lot of different options for dealing with that (censorship being only one, and obviously not one the Tor project would choose). Before we* used this lens, our only option was to ignore it and preserve the status quo.
Other "-isms" are just other tools. Anything that your culture cares too much or too little about -- and therefore tends to lie to you about -- is a possible lens to learn about users you're ignoring, because your mental model of "normal" doesn't match reality.
(* Note I'm not at all affiliated with Tor, just using "we" generally here.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vp8tToFv-bA
Fixed that for you.
Why is it a surprise that the people making these privacy tools were motivated by a desire for communication free of the chilling effects of violence?
For what it's worth, I think you're right about the common-carrier argument. If that's not the argument you're making, disregard my support.
A lot of these folks, in their reasonable zeal to prevent somebody on the internet having their feelings hurt or being made to feel scared, are ignoring the global costs to their chosen fuck-you-got-mine strategies of selective communications. A minority would be even happy to let, say, a misogynist with a cure for cancer be panned or banned irrespective of their other positive qualities. They can be hard to reason with.