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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.
It always amuses me that people think they can win arguments by freely redefining words.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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.
A horrible example of countries that are both liberal and, I suppose, repressive. Of course you can make your point without using offensive terms in most of those places and probably just get ejected from whatever venue you were haunting so my heart does not personally bleed for thee, but the point exists that one can be both liberal and authoritarian, witness Hillary Clinton.
Do you actually know the definition of those words except as they pertain to US politics and how you think they work?
In many places, "conservatism" is the authoritarian central regime. ISIS and the Taliban are "conservative".
And if you think American conservatives around about centralized power, look at it from the perspective of not being a Christian. "Conservative" in the US means "entrenching Christianity as being the highest authority with the ability to control the lives of others according to that".
Sorry, but you are so clueless it isn't funny. And the fact that you think "conservatism" in the US means any of that shit says you have no real understanding of it, just the fiction "conservatives" in the US like to tell themselves.
The people who want to overturn the right of women to have abortions, or entrench the right of religious people to be assholes ... they only are interested in protecting the rights of a specific group of people, but they actually wish to control the rights of others.
Most highly liberal governments are also highly oppressive? You haven't got a fucking clue what that word means.
The US Constitution is the most liberal document you can imagine.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
"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
If you're capitalizing those, you definitely don't know what they mean.
You are welcome on my lawn.
And by "Liberal" is that the actual meaning of the word or is it the hijacked meaning of the word used in the US to designate the Democrats?
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Progressives have already hijacked the word liberal. Liberalism is antithetical to socialism and communism and any other collectivist sect.
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
You mean the hijacked meaning of Liberal, not a true Liberal.
The political meaning of Liberal in the US designates the left wing in politics because Socialist is contaminated. In Europe Liberal can apply to the right wing instead and the socialists despise them.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Liberal vs. Repressive is an actual political spectrum, forget the abused meaning of Liberal in the US.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.