![]() After all, who gets called a terrorist in the US is different to who gets called a terrorist in Syria, which is different to who gets called a terrorist in China. The rhetoric is usually that only “bad people” want online anonymity, using whatever definition of bad people you care to use on a given day. The only people who want it are criminals, it’s inherently bad because you can use it to access child pornography or stalk people. Tor -and online anonymity in general- has a pretty bad reputation in some quarters. Given that this is the current debate, we decided to lay out the ethical considerations of using a web browser which enables online anonymity and resists censorship. “Apple will become the phone of choice for the pedophile,” said John Escalante, head of the Chicago Police Department’s Bureau of Detectives. ![]() ![]() His comments echo those of FBI director James Comey, who said he could not understand why Apple would “allow people to place themselves beyond the law.” Other police officials have been unequivocal in their condemnation. Police, he claimed, might not be able to stop crimes against children or solve murders without this data. Yesterday, Bloomberg ran a story about Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance, who said that Apple and Google should be legally compelled to hand over customer data necessary to investigate crimes. We were interested in the topic not only because of work we’d previously done about campus surveillance, but because of the rhetoric of the current debate for online anonymity. Here’s a bit of background about that project, and some of the text of the talk we gave. ![]() An activist friend of mine and I decided to look at the ethical considerations of the Tor Browser, an online anonymity network. During the fall semester, when I was still figuring out what I wanted to study, I took a class called “Privacy in Information Technology,” which dealt with topics like surveillance, big data, online anonymity, and the like.ģ0% of the grade was a final group project in December on some aspect of the course material, which consisted of a 10–15 minute spoken presentation and some form of media. ![]()
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