Does Tor offer more benefits or harms? New newspaper says it depends

The Tor anonymity network has generated controversy almost constantly since its inception nearly two decades ago. Proponents say it is a vital service for protecting online privacy and circumventing censorship, especially in countries with poor human rights records. Meanwhile, critics argue that Tor protects criminals who disseminate images of child abuse, traffic in illegal drugs and engage in other illicit activities.

Researchers released new estimates on Monday that attempt to assess the potential pros and cons of Tor. They found that around the world, nearly 7% of Tor users connect to hidden services, which researchers say are more likely to offer illegal services or content compared to normal websites. Connections to hidden services were significantly higher in countries classified as politically more “free” than in those which are “partially free” or “not free”.

Legal or illegal

Specifically, the proportion of Tor users accessing hidden sites overall is 6.7, a relatively low proportion. However, these users are not evenly distributed geographically. In countries with regimes classified as “non-free” by this score From an organization called Freedom House, access to hidden services was only 4.8%. In “free” countries, the share rose to 7.8%.

Here’s a breakdown graph:

In an article, the researchers wrote:

The Tor anonymity network can be used for legal and illegal purposes. Our results provide a clear, albeit probabilistic, estimate of the degree to which Tor users engage in one of the forms of activity. In general, Tor users in politically “free” countries are much more likely to use the network in possibly illicit ways. Many more questions remain, given the anonymous nature of Tor and other similar systems such as I2P and Freenet. However, our results strictly suggest that Tor users in more repressive “nonfree” regimes tend to be much more likely to venture through the Tor network to remove web content and therefore are comparatively less likely to participate. in activities that would be widely taken into account. malicious.

Estimates are based on a 1% sample of Tor’s gateway nodes, which researchers monitored from December 31, 2018 to August 18, 2019, with an interruption in data collection from May 4 to May 13. By analyzing directory searches and other unique signatures in traffic, the researchers distinguished when a Tor client visited normal websites or anonymous (or Dark Web) services.

The researchers, from Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia; Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York; and Cyber ​​Spy in Portsmouth, UK – admitted that the estimates are not perfect. This is in part because the estimates are based on the unprovable assumption that the vast majority of sites on the Dark Web provide illegal content or services.

However, the paper argues that the findings may be useful to policy makers trying to weigh the benefits of Tor against the harm it creates. Researchers see the results through the lens of the 2015 article titled The Dark Web Dilemma: Tor, Anonymity, and Online Surveillance Yes On freedom, the essay published by the English philosopher John Stuart Mill in 1859.

The Dark Web Dilemma

Researchers in Monday newspaper wrote:

These findings have a number of implications for research and policy. First, the results suggest that anonymous technologies like Tor present a clear public policy challenge and include a clear political context and geographic components. This political challenge is known in the literature as the “Dark Web Dilemma”. At the root of the dilemma is the so-called “harm principle” proposed in On freedom by John Stuart Mill. On this principle, it is morally permissible to take any action as long as it does not cause harm to another person.

The challenge with the Tor anonymity network, as its dual-use nature suggests, is that the ultimate political solutions promise to harm either party. Leaving the Tor network free from any police investigation is likely to cause direct and indirect damage resulting from the use of the system by those involved in the exploitation of children, drug trafficking and the sale of firearms, although this damage is, of course, very important. heterogeneous in terms of their potential negative social impacts and some, such as personal drug use, may also have primarily individual costs in some cases.

On the contrary, simply working to shut down Tor would harm dissidents and human rights activists, in particular, our results suggest, in more repressive and less politically free regimes where technological protections are often more needed.

Our results, which show the uneven distribution of legal and likely illicit Tor users across countries, also suggest that an imminent conflagration of public policies may be on the horizon. The Tor network, for example, runs on 6,000 to 6,500 volunteer nodes. Although these nodes are spread over several countries, it is plausible that many of these infrastructure points are clustered in politically free liberal democratic countries. In addition, Project Tor, which manages the code behind the network, is a nonprofit organization incorporated in the United States and traces its intellectual origins and much of its financial resources to the United States government.

In other words, much of the physical and protocol infrastructure of the Tor anonymity network is disproportionately bundled into free regimes, especially in the United States. Tying this trend to a strict interpretation of our current results suggests that the harms of the Tor anonymity network are clustered in free countries that host the Tor infrastructure, and the benefits clustered in disproportionately overly repressive regimes.

A “false” hypothesis

It didn’t take long for the people behind the Tor Project to question the results and the assumptions that drove them. In an email, Isabela Bagueros, Executive Director of the Tor Project, wrote:

The authors of this research paper chose to classify all .onion sites and all traffic to those sites as “illegal” and all traffic on the “Clear Web” as “legal”.

This assumption is wrong. Onion services are used by many popular websites, tools and services to provide their users with privacy and censorship circumvention benefits. For example, Facebook offers an onion service. Global news agencies, such as the New York Times, BBC, Deutsche Welle, Mada Masr, and Buzzfeed, offer onion services.

Alert platforms, file sharing tools, messaging applications, VPNOnion services are also used by browsers, email services, and free software projects to provide privacy protections to their users, including Riseup, OnionShare, SecureDrop, GlobaLeaks, ProtonMail, Debian, Mullvad VPN, Ricochet Refresh, Briar and Qubes OS.

(For even more examples and quotes from website administrators using onion services on why they use Tor: https://blog.torproject.org/more-onions-end-of-campaign)

Denying traffic to these widely used “illegal” sites and services is a generalization that demonizes individuals and organizations who choose technology that allows them to protect their privacy and circumvent censorship. In a world of increasing internet censorship and surveillance capitalism, online privacy is necessary for many of us to exercise our human rights to freely access information, share our ideas and communicate with each other. other. Falsely identifying all onion service traffic as “illicit” hurts the fight to protect encryption and benefits powers that attempt to weaken or outright ban strong privacy technologies.