Re: <nettime> Pascal Zachary: Rules for the Digital Panopticon (IEEE)

[Eugen Leitl <eugen@leitl.org>]

On Tue, Oct 15, 2013 at 10:44:49AM +0200, Bodà BalÃzs wrote:

> Do we need laws (which, apparently will be tossed aside under the veil
> of secrecy), or do we need technologies? The US State Dept, somewhat
> schizophrenically, poured billions of dollars to the development of

That's a slight exaggeration. See https://www.torproject.org/about/sponsors.html.en

> TOR, and other privacy enhancing technologies. It had to. It had to

A nitpick: it's Tor, not TOR.

> create those white spaces on the map from where political dissidents
> could operate. (TOR (and Wikileaks) are panoptic technologies
> themselves: they hide the guards of misbehaving governments). The US
> was slow to realize (or did they know this from the beginning?), that

Many people and organization funded Tor. Even US federal agencies are
not homogenous. Some of them might oppose anonymizing technologies, not 
realizing that other agencies depend on their existance.

> many will join these technological safe havens: pedophiles, pirates,
> drug dealers, terrorists, you name it. Their vibrant existence forces

I'm unhappy to hear you bought into the propaganda rhetoric. A recent 
hidden services survey, based on a Tor weakness fixed since found 
that vanilla uses of Tor are in the majority. 

> us to reconsider the social contract: we may have to surrender a
> certain level of order in order to benefit from the freedom that
> ensues.

Perfect anonymity and accountability are obviously mutually exclusive.


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