After the recent attacks in Paris, it is widely agreed upon
that officials need to make some type of changes to increase the security of
their people. Well, some documents were leaked that revealed potential plans
that France has to increase security. The first of these proposals is a ban on
public Wi-Fi during a state of emergency. The second is taking action to block
Tor, the encrypted web browser.
Okay, so France allegedly wants to ban public and shared Wi-Fi while the country is in a state of emergency. The reason that they are
doing this, according to the article on arstechnica, is that it is challenging
for police and other security officials to track people on these types of
networks.
The second proposal, the one that would ban Tor, is one that
is much more radical. They want to ban the encrypted web browser in an effort
to reduce the amount of crime that happens on the dark web, which must be
accessed through Tor. As the article mentions, it would be very difficult for
France to track who is using it. The article also likens the banning of Tor to
the Great Firewall of China. While I do not believe that the French proposal is
this strict, I can understand why the author made this reference.
This is important to the world, not just the people in
France. This is a huge step in the still young debate on internet freedom.
France, if they decide to prohibit Tor, will be making it illegal to use a
service that has both good and bad consequences. There is of course, a large
amount of crime that takes place over the dark web. It is a known fact that
many illegal transactions involving drugs, weapons, other paraphernalia, and
even services such as hit men, happen every day using Tor. However, there are
also perfectly legal activities that take place over the browser. There are
people who use Tor simply because they value their privacy and want to avoid
companies collecting their information and tracking them. I can totally
understand this use case. There are even people who buy illegal substances for
good reasons on Tor, such as the guy who could only afford black market
inhalers for his wife. He turned to Tor and it was ultimately successful for
him. By stripping the people of this tool, I do believe that France would be
hurting many people who do not deserve to have this privilege taken away. Also,
if France takes this action, it would make it much easier for other countries,
specifically ones that are geographically and socially similar to France (i.e.
England and Germany) to take similar actions to restrict the internet usage of
their people. I think this liberal shift towards a locked down internet is a
slippery slope.
I believe that it is a bad move for France to take either
one of these actions. Traffic over a public network would not be terribly hard
to keep track of. Any terrorist with serious intent would not use a public
network in an unencrypted fashion. So, taking away this privilege from the
99.9% of people who do not have malicious intent simply isn’t fair because the
people who do want to do harm will still be able to do it without public Wi-Fi.
And in response to the proposed ban on Tor, this is also silly. I feel the same
way about this as I do about gun control. Making it illegal will not stop the
criminals from committing crimes. It will simply force them to find a way
around the ban, and then continue to commit crimes all while taking away a
positive privilege from people who deserve it. So, I guess I feel that these
propositions will ultimately be ineffective and do more harm than good.
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