Fantastic presentation of TOR vs Repressive Govts, censorship/surveillance
State of the arms race between repressive governments and anti-censorship/surveillance Tor technology (and why American companies are on the repressive governments' side)
<snip from BoingBoing.net>
Last night's Chaos Computer Congress (28C3) presentation from Jacob Applebaum and Roger Dingledine on the state of the arms race between the Tor anti-censorship/surveillance technology and the world's repressive governments was by turns depressing and inspiring. Dingledine and Applebaum have unique insights into the workings of the technocrats in Iranian, Chinese, Tunisian, Syrian and other repressive states, and the relationship between censorship and other human rights abuses (for example, when other privacy technologies failed, governments sometimes discovered who was discussing revolution and used that as the basis for torture and murder).
Two thirds of the way through the talk, they broaden the context to talk about the role of American companies in the war waged against privacy and free speech -- SmartFilter (now an Intel subsidiary, and a company that has a long history of censoring Boing Boing) is providing support for Iran's censorship efforts, for example. They talked about how Blue Coat and Cisco produce tools that aren't just used to censor, but to spy (all censorware also acts as surveillance technology) and how the spying directly leads to murder and rape and torture.
Original Boing Boing Post:
http://boingboing.net/2011/12/29/state-of-the-arms-race-between.html#disqus_thread
Direct Link to YouTube: