Roger's Blurb on Motivations

1) We need to teach people that anonymity systems are not the primary way that criminals get anonymity on the net.

We hear from a lot of people who still believe that deploying anonymity systems means that criminals will get anonymity, and not deploying them means that criminals will have no way of getting anonymity on the net. We need to provide some explanations about botnets and trojans, and how they lead to phishing, extortion, identify theft, etc.

2) We need to let the world hear about the good uses for anonymity.

When somebody successfully uses an anonymity system for some good task, nobody hears anything. It's only if some abuse or problem occurs that other folks learn about it. So if the only things that people hear about anonymity systems are their bad uses, it makes sense that they would assume they are only used for bad.

3) We need to learn how to describe anonymity to different audiences.

The security provided by anonymity systems like Tor comes from diversity of users. We've made a lot of progress at learning how to phrase Tor's security to different audiences, but hearing from all the various users out there (individuals in the US, individuals in China, companies, law enforcement, government agencies, ...) will help us to get a better sense of how to better describe the benefits of systems like Tor.

4) The press keeps asking for actual examples.

It's easy for me to list the *possible* users of Tor, but most companies and government agencies that tell me they use Tor don't want to be publicly named. Further, I haven't taken the last step of collecting actual stories, cleaning them up, and putting them in one place. If it becomes commonplace for people and organizations to admit to wanting security, perhaps this will become easier.

Warming Effects should not focus solely on Tor -- it needs to be about location-private communication in general. Ten years ago people were arguing about whether they needed encryption for their web connections. Now people are just starting to think about whether they need the ability to hide their location and/or personal information from the websites they talk to and from the networks that connect them. We need to have a voice in this discussion.