On Sun, Jul 31, 2016 at 7:30 PM, Matthew Finkel matthew.finkel@gmail.com wrote: [...]
Obscuring an idea or purpose does help in some instances (this is how censorship circumvention works, after all), however, by not labeling Tor as a tool that promotes human rights the Tor community is lying about what Tor does and why many of us volunteer our time, money, and energy in support of it.
+1, and I'd like to speak to this point a bit. The social contract document, as I understand it, is an expression of who we want to be as a community, and what we aspire to do.
The social contract document is *not*, as I understand it, a specification for our software; a description of who may run it; a synopsis of what it's good for; or a list of what goals and beliefs users and operators are all expected to share.
It would be a category error to read Rogaway's "The Moral Character of Cryptographic Work", and say "oh, that's what OCB does!" Similarly it would be foolish to read RMS's views, and conclude that emacs can't be used to write a software patent application -- or to read ESR's views on contemporary politics, and conclude that fetchmail is better for reading pro-gun email than reading anti-gun email.
And it's also a category error to treat the goals and ideals in this Tor-creating community's social contract as if they spread by a kind of magic contagion to everybody in the world who likes, uses, promotes, provides, downloads, uploads, modifies, inspects, discusses, or operates the software we make.
Sure, the Grand Inquisitors of the world will pretend to embrace this category error, and use our social contract as justification for declaring innocent people their enemies. But that's what grand inquisitors do! If it were not our social contract, they would find an excuse to persecute their targets based on our mission statement, a political cartoon, the cypherpunk manifesto, one of the Snowden leaks, a slashdot post, or some political statement some Tor developer made once [*].
We can't protect our users by pretending that we have no views or opinions that tyrants might disagree with. Would that really fool anyone? All we can do IMO is to be honest, to continue to broaden our userbase to, and do our best to encourage the understanding of who we are, who our users are, and the diversity of needs and values within our userbase.
[*] Never mind the fact that it would be logically impossible for a single person to agree with the political views of all Tor programmers.