livejournal ban tor-nodes

[Marcus Griep]

On Wed, Nov 25, 2009 at 2:18 AM, James Brown <jbrownfirst at gmail.com> wrote:

> Very thanks.
> But did they say you about a character of that abuse?
> I thin that only an RSS feed of  LJ friends pages is not a serious
> ground for blocking the Tor network.
> If they did such not by order of the SUP for protection of the Russian
> dictatorship I can't understand why the SUP by they 2 years ago. For
> latent  shadowing against Russian oppositionists for the Federal
> security service of Russia?
> I was very sleepy when you wrote your letter (it was about 3 a.m at my
> place) and I coudn't recognize that I could try ask them a question
> concerning the next.
> By the information of Russian press (see, particularly
> http://www.newsru.com/russia/10nov2009/vkontakte.html ) the secret
> services of Russia arrested estimated murders of Markelov (many people
> in Russia think that they are not real murders because real economic
> base of Markelov's murder was deforestation of the Khimki forest against
> which Markelov fighted and any version about the revenge of
> "nationalists" have not under it real economic and money base and seems
> very absurd) through LJ activity of them.
> In accordance with this information they had access to the LJ not
> through the Tor but through the specific public wifi - so-called WIMAX,
> from account registered on assumed name.
> So, the Russian secret services had needed an information about
> ip-addresses of those users of the LJ for computing their through
> triangulation with  beam gain antennas.
> So, we can suspect that those ip-addresses were given to Russian secret
> services by the SUP besides the official inquiry of Russian authorities
> to the US authorities (as I know there is not an agreement on mutual
> assistance in criminal matters between Russia and the USA).
> If it was really so, it was an obvious interference of Russian
> government in internal affairs of the USA in accordance with
> international law.
> I don't know about the US criminal law but such actions are examined as
> an espionage by the Russain Criminal Code.
> I think that the notion of an espionage is approximately equal in all
> countries.


There's a lot of speculation in that statement, though I know little of
internal politicking within Russia. I think that the explanation via Jacob
is a pretty sound one; LJ doesn't want its paid value-added model
circumvented by this Russian site, that then chose to use Tor to breach LJ's
Terms of Service, and so the community has to bear the brunt of it.

I find it unlikely (but not impossible) that LJ would be consorting with a
Russian cover-up. LJ as a business has a long history of hosting[1]
dissenting opinion in from countries, including Iran, China, Kazakhstan[2],
and other speech-is-not-free countries. As a result, many of these countries
block or restrict access to LJ as opposed to "being in concert with"
LiveJournal. This may even take the form of bullying local ISPs to log
accesses to certain IP addresses, or dropping a transparent proxy in front
of outward accesses to these sites, as a means to the same end you describe
above, and either of which requires no help from LJ to execute.


[1]: hosting, not sponsoring, just hosting
[2]:
http://committeetoprotectbloggers.org/2008/10/16/kazakhstan-blocks-livejournal/

--
Marcus Griep
——
Ακακια את.ψο´, 3°
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