From: Michael Rand <mikerand@rcn.com>
  To  : <CPC@emoglen.law.columbia.edu>
  Date: Tue, 14 Mar 2006 14:29:23 -0500

A good use of Anonymity: Tor Protects the Good Guys but Can Also Protect the Bad Guys: & Comments On Open Source

A good use of Anonymity: Tor Protects the Good Guys but Can Also Protect the
Bad Guys:

  
The Berkman Center at Harvard had a presentation on technology called Tor
designed to protect dissidents from being tracked by governments etc. The
technology seems well thought out and powerful.  Articles have been written
about it in mainstream media like the Wall Street Journal.  The key question
is how to prevent the technology from being hijacked by the bad guys.  A
student at Columbia Law School I know studying with Professor Moglen has
said keep the anonymity and lets come up with other technology or human
process solutions to deal with the bad guys.  Will this work?  Any
suggestions? E.g. to fight spam?

On using this to protect Chinese dissidents:  There are measures that can be
taken but it sounds like a cat and mouse game.  There are human engineering
solutions that will help but won't solve the problem completely.

According to Tor we need both perfect software and perfect people to get
good use and not bad use.  E.g. When phishing messages have some publicly
available personal information inside vs. those that don't.  If they don't
15 percent respond.  If the messages do 85 percent respond.  I think they
said this is a Carnegie Mellon study.  Clearly the human side here is
important.

10 million early adoptors would want to use Tor or so we are told. 

Also vis a vis the question of those who believe in open source software: it
seems they need to make it work in windows (at least to have a gooey front
end) because the end users use windows.  

Interestingly the speaker David Dingle Dine
http://www.freehaven.net/~arma/cv.html   (lead developer?) doesn't use
windows.

I can see this would be useful for allowing discussion of hot topics in our
own country that people avoid because they are too hot. e.g. abortion etc.
Is anyone thinking about this?  Who knows you might even be able to talk
about how to achieve peace in the middle east without mudslinging.

The ACLU is even ready to defend any problems that come up with this.

Vis a vis publishing in places like Sudan.  Tor is only part of the solution
not all of it.

Listening to this lecture what's interesting is that clearly there are a
number of people working on net anonymity. 


The developers at Tor need help so if anyone is interested in helping out

Michael Rand
(212) 749 6766
mikerand@rcn.com

Blogs:
CyberHumanRightsLaw:  http://mikerand.blogs.com/cyberhumanrightslaw/
LearningTheLaw:       http://learningthelaw.blogspot.com/
JewishLawyer:         http://mikerand.blogs.com/jewishlawyer/
 

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