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I love me some privacy but have always been skeptical of Tor because I am afraid that I am acting as a relay for CSAM, which, even if encrypted I am not okay with.
Is that fear unfounded? To be honest I don’t really know how Tor works aside from some broad strokes.
No, by running a relay or exit node you are opting in to routing traffic that could contain CSAM. This is a problem with all anonymous unmoderated distributed systems like Tor. With Freenet, for example, you're even opting in to storing it (pieces of it in encrypted form that can't be accessed without the content hash key).
Privacy is good but so is censorship (moderation). The censorship just needs to be implemented by an accountable group of people that share the same interests of the users. Tor is trying to solve a problem that can only be solved through social struggle with institutions of power.
There always needs to be an uncensored option, but it doesn't have to be the same option most people use day to day. One region's "accountable group of people" is another region's authoritarian police state.
Tor isn't just used by CSAM creators and distributors, but also journalists, resistance fighters, and refugees. The only way it works is if regular traffic is mixed with sensitive traffic, otherwise there are methods to uncover the source of sensitive traffic.
If you run a relay, you will be transmitting encrypted CSAM, but you'll also be transmitting journalist correspondence with sensitive sources, coordination with refugees from brutal regimes, etc. You can't really pick and choose, and that's the whole point and why it can be so useful to people in danger.
I don't think lemmy or ActivityPub should tolerate CSAM, so I'm not implying that censorship is always bad, only that there needs to be an uncensored channel available.
Not unfounded, person was arrested recently for being an exit node used for CSAM
In which country? In most countries you just have to send LE a boilerplate email saying your run a Tor node and they'll leave you alone.
Austria was the country. There is a few wrinkles here. They found cp on one of the hard drives, they had text logs of him offering to host cp on a server, and in the end he was sentenced to 3 years probation.
they had text logs of him offering to host
Well, that explains everything. It's not the Tor node, it's that he was offering to host it.
It certainly does!
So it sounds like he wasn't just relaying it then...
This is new to me, and I would be very surprised if that has any (positive) effect.
It's always double edge. Don't you have anything to hide? Who need end to end encryption apart of pedos and terrorists? If you really want 100% security, then just give up 100% of your freedom.
What’s CAM?
Child sexual assault material
Probs intended to write CSAM - Child Sexual Abuse Material
Correct, it was a typo that I have since corrected.
I love this! I'm going to contact my local uni's tech dept to see if that's something they'd be interested in participating in if they're not already.