[tor-project] Is there a mission statement / list of goals for Tor Project?

Virgil Griffith i at virgil.gr
Sat May 21 04:45:18 UTC 2016


This seems like an obvious question, but

https://www.torproject.org/about/overview.html

gives me no clear answer.

-----

I've gotten conflicting reports on the goals of Tor ranging among:
* protecting Tor users and HSs
* preventing linking of IP addresses to internet traffic regardless of
whether someone is a Tor user
* developing and enabling privacy-enhancing technologies
* furthering human rights
* furthering "internet freedom"
* furthering "privacy"

Each of these is a fine and good thing.  However, the current
ambiguity makes it unclear what to do when these individually good
things conflict.  For example, Tor2web enables linking of client IP
addresses to internet traffic.  Which is bad.  However, it also
"furthers human rights" as it's the largest whistleblowing platform.
How to adjudicate?  When are we, as agents of Tor Project, serving
"the ideology of Tor" versus our own personal ideology?

Clarifying this is a standard part of organizational maturity.  For
example, Greenpeace does a similar thing:
* http://www.greenpeace.org/eastasia/about/mission/
* http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/about/our-core-values/

While different people will have slightly different ideas of what
constitutes the "Tor ideology", and we don't want to wantonly pick
fights, it seems reasonable for management to triage these
individually good things into different tiers.  Because right now I
see people claiming orthogonal things as Tor Project's ideology.


-V


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