The recent court decision and the acquittal of a Tor exit node administrator is perhaps a good reason to open up the issue of the operation of Tor nodes in Greece.
Tor is a project that produces open source software that offers a good level of anonymity on the internet. In an internet where control, censorship, and surveillance tend to become the norm, anonymous browsing is a valuable asset for many different social groups, often with different interests.
Before we analyze what the current situation is in Greece and what we can do to improve it, let's look at the reasons why it is worth helping the Tor network.
Why should we help the Tor network?
Tor is widely used by users in countries with authoritarian regimes that have imposed restrictions on the country's network, preventing access to specific Internet destinations. These countries include China, Iran, Syria, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and many others. Most recently, in March 2014, the Turkish government did not hesitate to block access to twitter.com throughout the country, later to youtube.com, to Google's DNS servers, and even torproject.org. The examples of network censorship are too numerous to fit in one article, while the situation is constantly changing, unfortunately for the worse.
On the other hand, the “civilized and democratic” states of the West are not lagging behind. In England, extreme network restrictions have been imposed for pirated or pornographic content, in many European countries, including Greece, there has been an attempt (successful or not) to block access to websites with pirated content, with the famous thepiratebay.org at the forefront. Both in Europe and in the USA, the various repressive/judicial blockades are usually accompanied by the corresponding – increasingly restrictive – laws. Through the establishment of technical methods of internet censorship imposed by campaigns that – at first glance – aim at piracy or socially unacceptable content such as child pornography, they actually bring closer and closer the restriction of digital freedoms that leads with mathematical precision to the silencing of voices that are not liked by this or that regime of power.
And if one part of the problem is the blocking of access to specific destinations, the other part - equally important - is the generalized surveillance regime on the Internet. The revelations of former NSA technician Edward Snowden, which have continued to this day since the summer of 2013, may basically talk about the "achievements" of the American NSA and the English GCHQ, but they essentially lay the foundation of the problem. Surveillance is neither an American nor an English phenomenon. We also have surveillance regimes in India, Germany, France, Greece, Russia, and other countries. In reality, it is a global, universal, social problem, directly related to the development and direction of use of new technologies. Surveillance is a valuable tool for social control, contributing more to the consolidation of a sense of fear and suspicion among citizens, than to the prevention of common "crimes", as it is commonly called.
In the above context, Tor and every tool for anonymous and secure use of the internet becomes necessary for every user. Tor is no longer necessary only for journalists, citizens of totalitarian states, military personnel and activists. Tor is useful even for those who do not want companies to monitor their activity on the internet, for those who want to protect their consumer habits from marketing and advertising companies. Anonymous and secure browsing on the internet is directly linked to the free expression and privacy of social parties. If societies do not drastically change the way they use new technologies, if drastic changes are not made to the way the internet and digital communications are structured, Tor will be the least that everyone will need for decent and free digital communications.
Often critics of Tor and anonymity tools in general argue that such tools are used by criminals for money laundering, malicious attacks, child pornography, etc. First, it must be understood and accepted that crime is a social phenomenon and is not due to the (technological) tool in question. A publicly available technology, such as Tor or the knife, is expected to be used for good or evil, depending on the intentions of the user.
By removing or not supporting Tor, we are not fighting social pathologies or crime. Borrowing what Roger Dingledine and Jacob Appelbaum have said many times in presentations (https://youtu.be/CJNxbpbHA-I?t=5m43s) of the Tor Project: The child who is a victim of sexual abuse and child pornography is not going to be spared if we removed Tor tomorrow. The child and family in China, Iran, or Syria, however, greatly increases the chances of escaping violence by bypassing the restrictions on their communication.
In other words, the “bad guys” have far more resources, methods, and tools at their disposal than the “good guys.” The “bad guys” will find a way to do something criminal anyway, as has been the case long before we even conceived of the idea of Tor. On the other hand, the “good guys” have far less at their disposal when it comes to protecting our anonymity, privacy, and the security of our communications.
What is the status of Tor in Greece today?
Using compass.torproject.org, (putting “Greece” in the Country field and “-1″ in the Number of Results) we get a list of all active nodes in Greece.
The list is sorted based on a criterion called Consensus Weight. Consensus Weight, a metric assigned to all nodes in the network, depends on node characteristics such as the bandwidth offered and uptime, and affects the likelihood that a Tor user will use that particular node.
Of the 20+ nodes on the list (May 2014), only the top 11 contribute substantially to the Tor network, that is, half. This is because -as mentioned above- there are two basic characteristics for a node: the bandwidth offered and the uptime, that is, the time that this node remains active. It is expected that more bandwidth makes the node “faster” and can serve more Tor users. The bandwidth requirements for the Tor network are increasing both due to the general development of broadband services (the “faster internet”) and due to the increase in the number of Tor users worldwide since in more and more countries there are monitoring and censorship issues. Uptime is essentially an indicator of stability for a specific node. The Tor network - and any network - is obviously healthier when it has stable nodes, and not nodes that turn on and off, e.g. we turn off the node at night when we go to bed.
So, although we should acknowledge the good(?) intentions of those who set up the nodes that are low on the list, unfortunately we should point out that these nodes do not practically help the network, as they have very low bandwidth (the Tor Project has set a lower limit of 100KB/s) and many of them have low uptime. A subsequent article will follow on how such nodes can help Tor by becoming Tor Bridges.
So we return to the first 11. Here the statistics for bandwidth and uptime are fine. However, it is observed that 11 of them are located in the same Autonomous System (a set of networks under the control of an entity, usually an Internet Service Provider), that of GRNET. Indeed, with the exception of the AuebTor node, which is located in ASOEE, all the other nodes seem to be located in the GRNET cloud service, ~okeanos.
Variety in Tor nodes
Another important feature for the health of the Tor Network is the diversity of nodes. The Tor network is based on volunteer node operation, there is no central registration process. This means that even a malicious person can set up Tor nodes in order to carry out de-anonymization attacks on Tor users. Such attacks are not hypothetical, but absolutely real and verifiable. In fact, thanks to Edward Snowden, we know that the NSA had operated around 10 Tor nodes for a short period of time . An adversary who operates a large percentage of nodes on the Tor network increases the chances of successful attacks against users. The only defense we have against this is node diversity.
In other words, we want to have Tor nodes in many different countries, in many different networks, Autonomous Systems, Internet Service Providers and Datacenters. We want diversity even in the administrators of these nodes.
So, we need to increase the number of nodes operating in Greece, to help the global Tor network and the users around the world who need it so much. In Greece, we need more, fast, and stable nodes, which at the same time will not be located in the same network/space/service, e.g. ~okeanos on GRNET.
In conclusion
Tor has proven to be an important tool for many social groups, with different interests or interests. Tor strengthens free expression and privacy on the Internet. The situation of the Tor network in Greece is not bad, but it is certainly in our hands to do many things to improve it. By contributing to the Tor network, we help people in other corners of the planet who need it and who we will probably never meet. By extension, we help ourselves by contributing to an Internet with less monitoring and censorship.
Source: skytal.es
