[tor-relays-universities] (FWD) Higher education act

Timothy Hayes thayes at rutgers.edu
Fri Mar 15 19:57:57 UTC 2013


Our institution's response to the HEOA doesn't involve blocking anything 
so we haven't needed any exceptions to support TOR on our network. We 
view TOR as being covered by the "safe harbor" provisions for 
"transitory digital network communications". So far that hasn't causes 
us any problems in this area.

That being said- tor is a *lot* slower than a direct connection (ie: 
bandwidth limited) and we do run a reduced exit policy on our exit node 
(ie: we block well-known P2P ports). That gives us two check marks in 
the 'technology-based deterrents' category.

We have had law enforcement communicate with us many times due to varied 
nefarious uses of TOR. A few local level police departments have 
grumbled that we don't have logs (because they don't understand TOR) but 
the feds and state level ones usually stop pestering us right after we 
tell them the IP is a TOR exit node. We've never had any legal problem 
related to TOR on the civil side of the law beyond takedown notices (and 
we send those the canned TOR P2P response.)

Internally when discussing TOR I've found it helps to point out that TOR 
receives funding from the US Government for its development and that the 
US State Department specifically and publicly called for technologies 
including TOR to be deployed by the US to assist the spread of democracy 
(such as in the "Arab Spring" revolutions. See "Promoting Global 
Internet Freedom: Policy and Technology", US State Department, May 2011)

-- 
Timothy Hayes
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
Office of Information Technology, Information Protection & Security
Voice: 848-445-7515 Fax: 732-445-8023
Email: thayes at rutgers.edu


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