Tor Browser 6.0.7 is released

[Moderator: please pass this comment]

> i like the exploit! it goes after childpron users! https://motherboard.vice.com/read/tor-browser-zero-day-exploit-targeted…

You may agree with the sentiments expressed by a commentator in Shari's blog (see her post about the current fundraising drive). I have not permitted to respond in her blog, but I'd like to try to respond to that commentator here:

You write:

> humanity is based on greed, money, and power.

Following the definition of Herodotus, "History" has too often been taken to mean "the narrative of major national-scale events". (Actually, Herodotus went even further than that: he defined history as the narrative of wars fought by the Greek city states!) Put another way: some would confine history to the study of the (mostly unintended) consequences of decisions taken by political/economic/military leaders. But I hope you will seek out and read a wonderful book which takes a very different view: Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States, HarperCollins, 1999.

Whenever I meet new people, I am always impressed anew by the fact that--- despite the poor impression of humanity which one might receive from reading mainstream news--- most people sincerely want very much to do good deeds. Many people--- especially the often young and idealistic breed known as "student activists"--- are motivated more by the desire to leave the world the better place than they found it than by naked greed or self-interest, and they are eager to work long and hard to achieve their goals. Zinn's magnificent history offers readers the chance to appreciate how history can be viewed as a struggle between ordinary people and the bosses and political leaders, who too often feel that might (which they possess) makes them right. And too often, those with wealth look enviously upward, rather than looking downward and resolving to help those with far less resources of wealth and power than they themselves enjoy.

To some extent these contrasting world views could be taken as reflecting the distinction between the socialist outlook exemplified by Howard Zinn and Sen. Bernie Sanders, and the libertarian outlook exemplified by the novels of the Russian exile Ayn Rand and the politics of certain Trump advisors.

> Those with money become hungry for power influenced by greed.

The contemporaries of Herodotus, living in a society which all too often executed its leading intellectuals (e.g. Socrates) for becoming too successful in their criticism of the government, ardently discussed very similar propositions. Later, the Romans taught politicians how to exploit "history" as propaganda (c.f. Julius Caesar's self-serving books describing in detail his conquests). A little later, Tacitus (himself a former government official) wrote disturbing accounts of the increasing corruption among the Roman economic/political elite, and writers like Suetonius made their fortune spreading salacious stories (often based upon fact) about the bizarre and horrifying behavior of the worst Roman emperors.

> [when calls for redistribution of wealth] threatens those with power (Governmental agencies, political powers, evil corporations, etc.) then they will try to evade or destroy the attempts of the redistribution.

Indeed, you might be interested in the dismal history of such episodes as the Pugachev rebellion (against Catherine, Empress of all the Russias), the Haitian revolution, the Cuban revolution, and a host of ongoing perpetual struggles in Latin America, Asia, and Africa which center around demands for redistribution of land, money, and democratization of political decision making.

You say you believe that

> [law] enforcement agencies should have the capabilities to source data to monitor illegal activities (ex. a suspected child molester, etc.

The devil, as always in complex societies, is in the details you left out.

What does it mean to say that X is a "suspected child molester"? Does anyone who uses Tor qualify? US AAG Leslie Caldwell--- whom we have learned is a "she" not a "he" as we mistakenly pronominalized her in a comment elsewhere in this blog--- seems to argue in her DOJ blog calling for Congress to let the changes to Rule 41 to through at midnight 1 Dec 2016, that the answer is "yes" [sic].

What does it mean to say that Y is a "suspected extremist". Does anyone who is a member of Riseup qualify? According to at least one judge in Spain, the answer is apparently "yes" [sic].

What does it mean to say that Z is "suspected of potential future radicalism"? According to CVE programs being implemented in all the "democratic" "Western" nations, most notably in the US, the answer is apparently "every schoolchild", or even "every citizen".

Once LEAs start down the slippery slope towards considering that they are "justified" [sic] in regarding every citizen as constantly under suspicion of *everything*, on the theory that everyone must have a positive probability (however tiny) of performing some misdeed at some point in their lives, they will wreak havoc on the lives of millions of ordinary citizens who not only are not reasonably suspected of having "done something wrong", far less reasonably suspected of having committed some heinous crime, but who would never have come close to doing anything terribly wrong if the government had simply left them in peace.

We are entering into a century which seems certain to see millions of citizens locked up in "preventative detention camps". Failing empires have had resort to such measures before. The British locked up most of the civilian population of the Boer states during the Boer wars, where many of them died of starvation or disease. In earlier centuries, the USG locked up entire First American tribes on the theory promulgated by Gen. Sheridan, that "the only good Indian is a dead Indian", and indeed a large percentage of those locked up in American concentration camps died. During WWII, the USG again locked up millions of US citizens of Japanese ancestry in concentration camps because officials decided they were all *potential* "spies".

Close advisors of Donald Trump have cited these dismal examples as justification for their stated intention to do the same thing to Muslim Americans, Mexican Americans, Socialists (supporters of Bernie Sanders), and maybe even Democrats (supporters of Hillary Clinton). Or at least, their stated intention to seriously discuss doing such things. What a tragedy for America. What a terrible example for the entire world, at a time when all the world's governments seem to be turning in unison to the worst kind of authoritarianism, the kind tinged with the sort of ethnic hatreds which have historically always led to state-sponsored genocides.

> This data collection should be against the law when it does in fact breech my privacy. Just because I look at camera's on google doesn't mean that I should be receiving advertisements about it for the next week and a half on 90% of the non-camera webpages that I visit.

Julia Angwin's book Dragnet Nation, which I also recommend, focuses on this kind of invasion of privacy. But however awful Google and Comcast are or may yet become, it seems unlikely that they will be kicking down doors, tossing grenades at infants, or dragging wailing citizens off to labor camps for "political re-education" by slave labor.

Tor users are generally far more concerned with invasions of privacy by government agencies such as GCHQ/SCA, NSA/FBI/NCTC, because these dragnets are the ones which construct what NSA whistle-blower William Binney memorably described as "turnkey fascism". And with the election of Donald Trump, many frightened citizens all over the world--- and, ironically, many leaders of the USIC--- fear that prediction, which most people long dismissed as "paranoid fantasy", has come to pass.

I think the best way to understand why civil libertarians are so horrified by the prospect of state-sponsored dragnets feeding CVE programs is to study in detail the original documents from the Snowden leaks, some of which are collected here:

https://www.eff.org/nsa-spying/nsadocs

(It's a big job because there are many acronyms to learn and many puzzle pieces to fit together, but like anything with a steep learning curve, once you get into this at some point your progress will become much more rapid.)

You suggest that we who warn of the horrors to come in America believe that "everyone is out to get us" [sic]. No, we are warning that NCTC is out to get us, and we have cited the documents which explain what we mean, and confirm our claims. Don't believe it because we say it is so, believe it because (in leaked documents) NCTC explains what they intend to do to us.

You write that Americans have lost faith in the desire of their government to protect and uplift them. Indeed we have, in many cases because we ourselves have been directly targeted by state-sponsored espionage campaigns. Some of the leaked Snowden documents specifically confirm that we have been, and no doubt will continue to be, indefinitely, on the list of people to be punished with an escalating sequence of reprisals. Don't believe it because we say it is so, believe it because people giving TS/SCI talks at NSA and GCHQ headquarters said it is so. (See the EFF repository.)

If our writings at times seem to suggest that we take the struggle of The People v The Man very personally, that is because we do, because we have learned that *they* marked us down as "enemies" long before we had ever heard their names, in the lost era of innocence, in the halcyon days when we naively believed that if we lived quietly and behaved well by seeking to do right and avoiding demands by our social superiors that we do evil, we would be left in peace, because as we knew very well, we certainly are not and never were "criminals" or "evildoers". But as we have learned, simply by bearing the "wrong" color skin or adhering to the "wrong" religion or coming from the "wrong" countries, we are regarded in the halls of real American power (the USIC) as actual or potential "Enemies of the State" [sic].

The literary works of Blok, Babel, and other revolutionary writers, seem strangely relevant to the experience of the masses in a another land (the USA) approximately a century later, just as Russians who endured the horrors of Stalinism once took solace in the poetry of Whitman and Yevtushenko.

Come out, come out!
On this day of sorrow, the long shadow of night
Spreads over the earth.
The servile faith in our little father the czar has collapsed.
...
Look around: we're lifeless
And without fear because of your servants,
Because of the merchants and the kulaks,
Because of the squires and the industrialists.
...
The czar listened to his people without speaking,
And moved his hand...
All around, the earth was shaken by a terrible sound
And the palace square was covered by corpses:
The people fell, riddled with bullets and lead.

Katz was writing about a massacre which occurred during the 1917 revolution, but he almost could have been writing about the future history of Standing Rock, or the next big anti-Trump rally in some American city.