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Countries That Use Tor Most Are Either Highly Repressive or Highly Liberal
Joseph Cox, reporting for Motherboard: You might assume that people in the most oppressive regimes wouldn't use the Tor anonymity network because of severe restrictions on technology or communication. On the other hand, you might think that people in the most liberal settings would have no immediate need for Tor. A new paper shows that Tor usage is, in fact, highest at both these tips of the political spectrum, peaking in the most oppressed and the most-free countries around the world. "There is evidence to suggest that at extreme levels of repression, Tor does provide a useful tool to people in those circumstances to do things that they otherwise would not be able to do," Eric Jardine, research fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI), a Canadian think-tank, told Motherboard in a phone call.
Why?
People use Tor when they want to say something they could get in trouble for having said. Some countries ban insults to the Prophet. Some countries ban insults to the niggers.
Most highly liberal governments are also highly oppressive. Liberalism is all about centralizing power in a large government structure and keeping a very short leash on all citizens, convservatism on the other hand is about keeping power decentralized and in the hands of the individual and ensuring that nobody can ever be a slave to an authoritarian central regime.
what it was used for would be nice to know, I suspect there are different uses...but that defeat the purpose of tor eh?
nothing to see here - move along
People who live in oppressive regimes need anonymity. People who live in free countries know the value of their liberty and anonymity because they see the threats to it.
I'm afraid I don't see this as particularly shocking.
People who live in places like the UK where they've already said "you don't really get privacy or anonymity because we said so" have likely just accepted that as a fact, because they already don't have it.
People who have more freedom, and people who have less freedom, have a much more immediate sense of what they have, stand to lose, or don't have.
Especially since increasingly the governments of those "liberal" countries are trying to assert that, no, you don't get to have privacy and anonymity, because they'd really prefer if they had 100% access to your life.
If the national police forces of most Western countries had their way, we'd all give up these freedoms so that assholes could pretend they're protecting our freedoms.
Sorry, telling me I no longer have those freedoms isn't protecting them. It's the fucking opposite.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Modern app appers know that ONLY apps can app apps, so they should be using appy app apps to app other apps, NOT LUDDITE SOFTWARE like Tor!
Apps!
I didn't know Liberal vs. Repressive was a political spectrum.
Maybe they mean Libertarian vs. Authoritarian? Or maybe they mean Tor use tends to cluster around the two independent variables Liberal and Repressive? Or maybe whoever wrote the summary or article is merely showing their bias, either intentionally or unintentionally, by calling this a "political spectrum"?
"Liberal" is indeed a word that has several meanings.
In this case, the use of the word in the headline is clarified in the text: it is used as the opposite of "repressive", in its meaning of "most free."
(Definition 3: "of, pertaining to, based on, or advocating liberalism, especially the freedom of the individual and governmental guarantees of individual rights and liberties.")
(The phrase used in the actual article is "liberal democracies." This does not mean "democracies that elect governments from the Liberal party."):
This might run counter to some people's intuition; wouldn’t liberal democracies have little need for Tor? “But because it's dual-use, you start to see a different pattern,” Jardine said, meaning that Tor is not just used to circumvent censorship in oppressive regimes, for example. Instead, the technology could be to protect privacy, or for criminal purposes. (It's worth remembering that the study looked at data largely before the fallout of Edward Snowden's June 2013 revelations).
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
In order to maintain a highly liberal society, the government has to become more and more authoritative. This means in practice there is very little difference between a liberal and repressive government, the difference is the perceived freedoms. Just take a look at any socialist country if you don't believe me.
How do we know which countries use Tor?
Isn't it meant to be anonymous?
Sure, you can map the end nodes, but that doesn't get you anywhere, does it?
Since "Highly Liberal" is a subset of "Highly Repressive", the story title is somewhat repetitive.
The thing is, there is a tendency to think that a government that forces everyone to do things the way you think it should be done is not repressive. As long as one can do what one wants, one may be surprised and offended to discover others believe they are being oppressed.
Over and over again a movement starts to deal with real problems and then overshoots into creating other problems whether or not their methods are still consistent with fixing the original problem. And most of society smugly blames the people pointing out the other problems for the original problem at about the same time they accept that the original problem is a bad thing- because it lets them blame someone besides themselves.
Many will be annoyed that I'm picking "Liberal" specifically and not some other adjectives that lead to represssion here- I'm responding to the particular title. The principle, while it certainly fits here, is more general.
Countries with the most negative gradients of "liberty" over time are the highest users of Tor.
The most liberal countries tend to be full of whites (aka crackers). Does this mean that there is something endemic about crackerhood that forces them to be all squirley and secretive. Are the all using the extra privacy to exploit children.
Also we must ask ourselves why crakervilles tend to be liberal. Is it because the crackers feel quilty about being a cracker and therefore turn to liberalism so they can help those poor disadvantaged trangendered latino african americans be just as smart and capable as a cracker such as themselves. Or possibly because they live around a bunch of crackers and do not realize that most disadvantaged transgedered Latino African Americans are in fact as racists as David Duke ever was and really don't like their crackery white ass.
Or maybe there is somehing to being a band of crackers where they can work together and not use the freedoms that liberalism gives them to rob the larger liberal society as a whole.
This really is not an all inclusive analysis because White Russia was and is full of crackers, yet they turned their brand of liberalism to evil. Maybe it is just something about the scandanavian are that allows crackers to live in their liberal utopia.
Why does noone else ever give these hard hitting analysis and discussions such as I do.
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The political universe, much like the physical universe, is in fact curved. Go far enough in either direction and you'll find yourself on the other side. ;)
Just the fact that someone is able to get numbers, makes TOR or any other anonymization irrelevant in the larger scale of things.
In case people have forgotten: TOR was created by the US government - it exists to fuck with China, Russia, etc... all the small-time 'evils' it enables are irrelevant which is why it continues to exist. btw, look who banned Bitcoin: China and Russia...
To get at the research paper itself would cost me a minimum of $36.
It's not clear to me how you build meaningful global stats for a service that is usually promoted here as anonymous. It is also not clear to me how these states relate to the population as a whole.
The ultimate test of a "secret messaging" system is whether people generally feel safe and comfortable using it. The old-time spy hated the gadget or the code book that his handlers claimed could be easily hidden or disguised or disposed of in a pinch. It never quite worked out that way.
Political repression isn't such a good measure by itself. Many countries that seem politically non-repressive are socially very repressive; that is, legally, little is going to happen to you if you state an unpopular opinion, but you may greatly hurt your job or career chances. Many European nations fall into that category, and the US is increasingly moving in that direction as well. Just look at the current Title IX witch hunts and the wild accusations of racism against anybody who doesn't toe the progressive party line.
All I found was a chart and an abstract. At no time did I see the actual countries listed.
Also how liberal a nation is can be up for debate.
For example some nations in the EU have hate speech laws but almost no restriction on sexual content.
In the US you will often see age restriction on sexual content but no restriction on political speech. Which is more free or liberal?
I would like to to have seen a list of the nations and how they ranked them before I draw any conclusion.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Would those liberal countries include those with all-encompassing network monitoring programs, with trigger word detection? That kind of "liberal" is not my kind of liberal.
So liberal that anything not liberal is being repressed.
Does nobody realize that the Left = Total Control. Socialism and Communism...
Liberal is staunchly on the left.
Therefore, using logic:
Countries that use Tor are Highly Repressive would have been a sufficient title to this post.