cross-posted from: https://links.hackliberty.org/post/285435
When a private sector company blocks Tor, I simply boycott. No private entity is so important that I cannot live well enough without them. But when a public service blocks Tor, that’s a problem because we are increasingly forced to use the online services of the public sector who have gone down the path of assuming offline people do not exist.
They simply block Tor without discussion. It’s not even clear who at what level makes these decisions… could even be an IT admin at the bottom of the org chart. They don’t even say they’re blocking Tor. They don’t even give Tor users a block message that admits that they block Tor. They don’t disclose in their privacy policies that they exclude Tor.
Just a 403 error. That’s all we get. As if it needs no justification. Why is the Tor community so readily willing to play the pushover? Even the Tor project itself will not stand up for their own supporters.
The lack of justification is damaging because it essentially sends the message: “you Tor-using privacy seekers are such scum we don’t even have to explain why you are outcast. We don’t even have to ask permission to exclude you from participating in society” This reinforces the myth that Tor users are criminals and encourages non-criminal Tor users to abandon Tor, thus shrinking the Tor userbase. The civilized world has evolved to a point of realizing the injustice of #collectivePunishment. At best this is a case of punishing many because of a few. I say “at best” because I’m skeptical that a bad actor provokes the arbitrary denial of service.
When the question is publicly asked “why did service X start blocking Tor” answers always come as speculation from people who don’t really know, who say they were probably attacked.
Because even among the very tech savvy, Tor is only used by a tiny fraction of the computer-using population and there’s no reason a public service would support it actively?
Most sites only support Tor access because it’s harder to block it than to ignore it until it becomes a problem.
Small groups are indeed easy to marginalize. Cloudflare is doing most of the work in keeping the Tor population small. I’m not convinced this fully answers the question. Are you saying the Tor community is so small that it does not include activists? Why does EFF & Tor Project itself neglect to stand up against oppressors?
I must say I don’t accept the trope of saying Tor users need “support”. This phrasing implies misunderstanding. When a website is deployed it automatically supports all TCP/IP connections including those coming from Tor exit nodes. Blocking Tor is a purposeful act following from a conscious decision to exclude a demographic which requires an effort proactively configure the site to deny service. This assumes we’re talking about conventional self-hosted 403 and 462 errors, contrary Cloudflare or Siteground which flip things around so naïve users running with defaults unwittingly block Tor & must take an action to correct the permissions.