Take Back the Internet with Us

Even as existential threats to Tor increase, in some ways things are looking up!

In a remarkable development which I would like to see Tor Project brag about, the BBC has just launched an onion mirror, citing mass protests around the world, in the face of government censorship. Places such as Chile, Brazil, Argentina, Ecuador, Haiti, Lebanon, Russia, Hong Kong, USA, and the UK itself have all seen enormous protests against staggering economic hardships and political oppression.

Our Deep State adversaries and our Drumpist enemies are proceeding to engage in messily public and vicious mutual destruction. Couldn't happen to a nicer bunch! :-)

Former FBI and CIA officials announce they are planning to flee to New Zealand, even as various nations build the case for war crime prosecutions in the Hague, and as DOJ is preparing to forcibly return these persons on the very rendition aircraft formerly sent to collect Snowden, Whitey Bulger, and various "high-level detainees", in order to face political charges in the US.

The further breakups of the UK, the Russian Federation, and the USA, possibilities which not long ago were regarded as outlandish, are increasingly discussed seriously in the political backrooms, and even in public by more and more members of the "Western" pundit class. Even the global Military-Surveillance Industrial Complex, including all the major "Western" "defense corporations" as well as corporation snoops (Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Facebook and all them like that) and CAAS (Cyberwar-as-a-Service) companies such as NSO Group, Gamma, Hacking Team, Cellebrite, etc., are coming under intense criticism, even by mainstream pundits.

At least two authoritarians, in the US and RU, have grossly violated the first Law of Autocratic Survival: keep the generals happy. Drump's war with the American officer class is well known; Putin's problems are evident from the transparently miserable faces of his leading generals in ludicrous state-sponsored propaganda photographs celebrating the Russian military during such events as Navy Day, and such embarrassments as several very revealing strategic technology failures, leaks from Russian spy agencies, etc. Massive protests in Chicago and Moscow have further demonstrated the fundamental weakness of both regimes.

Drump is now threatening to send the army into Chicago, San Francisco, and Baltimore. That kind of action did not work out very well for the USSR. It's one thing to invade Afghanistan (as both the USSR and the USA attempted and ultimately failed at), but quite another to send the army into your own great cities.

In China, Xi's peak of power already seems to lie in the distant past. (In some centuries, 12 months can seem like an eternity.) The Chinese government has tried to avoid following the American and Russian models of self-destruction, but it is becoming more clear every day that Xi has stumbled onto his own path to rack and ruin. Modern China, it must be emphasized, is a highly artificial twentieth century creation, and Xi cannot hide the fact that Tibet and Western China have never historically been Chinese. Far more than the UK and USA, and even more than the Russian Federation, the current boundaries of modern "China" are a hoax, and so long as technical censorship-evasion tools exist, no government can indefinitely perpetrate such dramatically counterfactual hoaxes.

Even the long overdue collapse of the absurdly anachronistic monarchies in the UK, Saudi Arabia and Thailand appears increasingly likely to happen within the next decade.

Global income inequality. Global climate change. A global mass extinction event. The rising threat of multiple regional famines and water shortages. The threat of global pandemics. Of nuclear war and omnicide. Clearly, many things have to change very quickly, if humanity is to extricate itself from a mess very much the making of the global economic and political elite. The key element to making that happen is truth. And Tor by intent and by design can and does bring truth to the People.

Truth to the People!

Let that be our rallying cry.

As a long-time Tor user (not a TP employee), I ask everyone to join me in supporting Tor by using Tor (even if you don't yet believe you "need" Tor) and by contributing some money to Tor Project, Tails Project, Debian Project, and other key NGOs which power the global online resistance.