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EFF claims that "In mid ­August 2015 the Boston office of the US Department of Homeland Security contacted the Portsmouth and Lebanon Police Departments to warn

• fweespeech 11y ago
  https://www.propublica.org/article/library-support-anonymous-internet-browsing-effort-stops-after-dhs-email https://www.propublica.org/article/library-support-anonymous... > When the DHS inquiry was brought to his attention, Lt. Matthew Isham of the Lebanon Police Department was concerned. “For all the good that a Tor may allow as far as speech, there is also the criminal side that would take advantage of that as well,” Isham said. “We felt we needed to make the city aware of it.” > DHS spokesman Shawn Neudauer said the agent was simply providing “visibility/situational awareness,” and did not have any direct contact with the Lebanon police or library. “The use of a Tor browser is not, in [or] of itself, illegal and there are legitimate purposes for its use,” Neudauer said, “However, the protections that Tor offers can be attractive to criminal enterprises or actors and HSI [Homeland Security Investigations] will continue to pursue those individuals who seek to use the anonymizing technology to further their illicit activity.”
• justizin 11y ago
  On the first page, the brief reference to this is a link to this article: https://www.propublica.org/article/library-support-anonymous-internet-browsing-effort-stops-after-dhs-email https://www.propublica.org/article/library-support-anonymous... It does seem an oversight, since there are 5 or 6 citations in EFF's letter.
• utnick 11y ago
  Also to be fair, is it proven that Tor's most popular use-case is something other than criminal activity? I know there are legit uses for Tor certainly, but it wouldn't really surprise me if criminals were the primary users
  • some-guy 11y ago
    I don't know the answer to your question, but one thing to keep in mind is that "criminal activity" does not always imply "morally questionable activity". To use extreme examples, someone watching child pornography isn't the same as a journalist hiding from an oppressive regime.
  • api 11y ago
    Criminals are numerically the most common Tor users. But the difference is that what's "criminal" depends on your place of residence. In America Tor is mostly used (other than as a curiosity) for drugs and child porn. The former I could care less about, while the latter is indeed creepy. It's also occasionally used for private communication with journalists, a numerically less common use but a politically critical one. While I strongly detest child porn, I equally detest drug prohibition and journalist and whistleblower harassment/censorship. In Iran? China? Saudi Arabia? Russia? In places like that Tor is used for dissident communication and private correspondence with people overseas. In those places public opposition to the ruling regime can itself be a crime. There are also authorities including police and intelligence personnel who use Tor -- very ironically to hide from criminals. For example, an undercover cop might use Tor to hide their correspondence with the police from digital snoops in the employ of a criminal organization they are infiltrating. Some organized crime outfits are very sophisticated, making undercover work actually require a degree of 'op-sec' on the part of the agent. Compromise can be fatal. Tor is a gun. Criminals use guns but so do police, hunters, and people legitimately defending themselves. In America you could probably defend Tor and other crypto tools on second amendment grounds.
    • ironsides 11y ago
      Please provide sources to support your argument. Edit: Why would I be modded down for asking someone making claims (questionable ones at best) to provide sources?
      • api 11y ago
        Try this: http://geekslop.com/2015/catching-pedophiles-running-secret-dark-web-tor-honeypot http://geekslop.com/2015/catching-pedophiles-running-secret-... "... First, the pedo site saw magnitudes more traffic than the counterfeiting or drugs websites – in the order of 100 times more traffic than the other two combined. ..." BTW I wasn't arguing that Tor itself is bad, just refusing to engage in the common denialism one sees among crypto and Tor advocates in claiming it has no bad uses. The truth is that many things have negative uses: guns, knives, security systems, Bitcoin, crypto, fireworks, spray paint, alcohol or virtually any drug, explosives, drones, cameras, etc. All those things have positive uses as well, and it's ultimately the user who is responsible for how they are used. Pedophiles use SSL too, should we ban that? As far as police and intelligence agency use of Tor, look up some of the talks by the Tor founders in which they cite examples of these uses. In addition to undercover use, Tor is useful for law enforcement to hide their network location while investigating potential criminal sites online. Otherwise a site might easily see that the traffic is coming from a police or .gov site.