A Quick, Simple Guide to Tor and the Internet of Things (So Far)

Here is another article on this valuable initiative:

https://theintercept.com/2016/07/20/tor-could-protect-your-smart-fridge…
Tor Could Protect Your Smart Fridge From Spies and Hackers
Jenna McLaughlin
20 Jul 2016

> There’s a growing fear that the exploding internet of things — from baby cams to pacemakers — could be a goldmine for spies and criminal hackers, allowing them access to all kinds of personal photos, videos, audio recordings, and other data. It’s a concern bolstered by remarks from top national security officials.

Some Tor users have been calling for Tor Project and like-minded human rights and civil liberties advocacy groups to pressure EU politicians and tech industry leaders* to engineer incentives aimed at growing a privacy industry. This might be a lost cause in the US, but I think some politicians in countries like Germany would be receptive.

In particular, some Tor users have been calling for inexpensive but reliable devices which can help consumers verify that their own devices are behaving well. For example, someone might want to check that their smart phone has not been surreptitiously "hot-miked" (remotely turned in an audio bug which transmits your IRL conversations to a government agency, even though the phone appears to be "turned off".

Or someone might want to verify that they really have disabled geolocation services on their WiFi devices. Journalists reporting from active war zones have been successfully targeted by hostile governments for assassination by drone/air strike. This is the exactly the scenario which a pair of gifted security researchers are working to prevent:

https://theintercept.com/2016/07/21/edward-snowdens-new-research-aims-t…
Edward Snowden’s New Research Aims to Keep Smartphones from Betraying Their Owners
Micah Lee
21 Jul 2016

> In early 2012, Marie Colvin, an acclaimed international journalist from New York, entered the besieged city of Homs, Syria while reporting for London’s Sunday Times. She wrote of a difficult journey involving “a smugglers’ route, which I promised not to reveal, climbing over walls in the dark and slipping into muddy trenches.” Despite the covert approach, Syrian forces still managed to get to Colvin; under orders to “kill any journalist that set foot on Syrian soil,” they bombed the makeshift media center she was working in, killing her and one other journalist, and injuring two others.

Unfortunately, the site which published their paper is blocking Tor!

https://www.pubpub.org/pub/direct-radio-introspection

* Tech industry leaders: presumably not including anti-democracy billionaire Peter Thiel, cofounder of Palantir (one of the authoritarian-enabling firms which conspired in a disinformation/disruption scheme targeting journalist Glenn Greenwald, US high school students in Seattle, and others):

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jul/21/peter-thiel-republic…
Donald Trump, Peter Thiel and the death of democracy
Ben Tarnoff
21 Jul 2016

> What Trump offers Thiel isn’t just an excuse to be contrary and politically incorrect. Trump gives Thiel something far more valuable: a way to fulfill his long-held ambition of saving capitalism from democracy. In a 2009 essay called The Education of a Libertarian, Thiel declared that capitalism and democracy had become incompatible. Since 1920, he argued, the creation of the welfare state and “the extension of the franchise to women” had made the American political system more responsive to more people – and therefore more hostile to capitalism. Capitalism is not “popular with the crowd”, Thiel observed, and this means that as democracy expands, the masses demand greater concessions from capitalists in the form of redistribution and regulation. The solution was obvious: less democracy. But in 2009, Thiel despaired of achieving this goal within the realm of politics. How could you possibly build a successful political movement for less democracy?
>
> Fast forward two years, when the country was still slowly digging its way out of the financial crisis. In 2011, Thiel told George Packer that the mood of emergency made him “weirdly hopeful”. The “failure of the establishment” had become too obvious to ignore, and this created an opportunity for something radically new, “something outside the establishment”, to take root. Now, in 2016, Thiel has finally found a politician capable of seizing that opportunity: a disruptor-in-chief who will destroy a dying system and build a better one in its place. Trump isn’t just a flamethrower for torching a rotten establishment, however – he’s the fulfillment of Thiel’s desire to build a successful political movement for less democracy.
> ...
> For Thiel, a smaller, more easily manipulated mob is preferable to a bigger one. If democracy can’t be eliminated, at least it can be shrunk through authoritarianism. A strongman like Trump, by exploiting the racial hatred and economic rage of one group of Americans, would work to delegitimize and disempower other groups of Americans. He would discipline what Thiel calls “the unthinking demos”: the democratic public that constrains capitalism.
> ...
> Thiel’s preferred political future isn’t hard to picture. The government shoulders the research costs for capitalists but makes no demands and sets no conditions. An authoritarian leader uses racial anger to set one portion of the population against another, and cracks down on those he sees as alien or illegitimate. The state becomes even more responsive to the needs of capitalists and even less responsive to the needs of workers and citizens. What Thiel calls the “oxymoron” of “capitalist democracy” is resolved – by jettisoning democracy.
> ...
> A Trumpist state could do much to soothe the crisis of capitalism: it could pour public dollars into discovering the next lucrative technology for the private sector while holding the line against the redistributive clamor of a rising millennial majority. Thiel has a history of making bets that pay off big. With Trump, he may have made another.