Self Proclaimed As Fighting Surveillance, Library Freedom Project Is Tied to Tor Service With Its Deep Ongoing Connections, Including Financing, To The U.S. Government

Two WNYC On The Media segments, both about surveillance, clash because of what connects them: What you might learn from each of them about the relationship of the Tor Service to our federal government and its surveillance efforts.  For libraries this means. . . keep reading.

We first heard about the Library Freedom Project on what we thought was an excellent WNYC On The Media segment about United States government surveillance of patrons in American libraries aired on June 5, 2015: Librarians Vs. The Patriot Act.  Our library defending interest was already piqued and attuned to the issue.  The On the Media segment aired just a few months after a National Notice article about surveillance in libraries: Snowden Revelations Considered: Is Your Library, Once Intended To Be A Protected Haven of Privacy, Spying on You?

In that On The Media segment an interview with Alison Macrina was used to supply and put much of the information in context and it informed us that Ms. Macrina is the founder of the Library Freedom Project, and that with “help from the Knight Foundation, she and an ACLU attorney have created workshops on how to maintain privacy online.” 

The Library Freedom Project Twitter page (with a crossed-out surveillance eye symbol as its logo) promises that “We fight for privacy rights” and that the Library Freedom Project is:

Fighting for intellectual freedom and against authoritarianism. Coming to a library near you.

On the Library Freedom Project website we learn more about Alison Macrina and her connection to the Tor Project (emphasis supplied):

Alison Macrina
Founder & Executive Director

Along with founding the Library Freedom Project, Alison is a librarian, internet activist, and a core contributor to The Tor Project. Passionate about surveillance and it’s connection to global injustice, Alison works to demystify privacy and security topics for ordinary users.

On the Library Freedom Project “Resources” page (which includes a tweeted compliment from Edward Snowden) their website has more about TOR touting it as "beneficial to libraries":

All About Tor

What is Tor, and why is it beneficial to libraries? How does it work? How can it help my library patrons? In this course, we discuss the need for anonymous browsing, give a crash course on using Tor, and walk librarians through the process of adding it to their library labs.

That links to a “Curriculum for teaching all about Tor” page including a link to download Tor.

On another page of the site the Library Freedom Project announces “We are excited to partner with The Tor Project to bring Tor exit relays into libraries!”  What this means is a little complicated, but it means using the libraries to help Tor.  In fact, it's interesting how much of the Library Freedom Project website involves efforts to make Tor available and get it used.

What is all this about “Tor”?  Does Tor provide privacy?. . .

. . . If you listened to another relatively recent On The Media segment (May 25, 2018), this time about Yasha Levine’s book “Surveillance Valley- The Secret Military History of the Internet,” you learn that Tor does NOT provide privacy as advertised and that it is heavily funded by the United States government, thus raising questions about what the government is accomplishing through that funding.

Yasha Levine’s “Surveillance Valley- The Secret Military History of the Internet.”

Here is some of the transcript of Yasha Levine being interviewed by OTM's Bob Garfield:

    YASHA LEVINE: So the Tor browser, it’s a separate browser that you download and that you use, and it promises to protect your anonymity on the internet. So the websites that you go to don't know who you are. . . .

    BOB GARFIELD: So that’s great. These apps have delivered us from the prying eyes of the state, whether it's the Iranian state or the US government. We can navigate around the net without fear because these civilian heroes have given us the tools to do so.

    YASHA LEVINE: Except not. [LAUGHS] And one thing that I outline in my book is just how dependent both Signal and Tor are on government contracts. So Tor, anywhere from 90 to 98 percent of its budget depends on government contracts. . . .. And the origins of Tor are very interesting. The origins of Tor are not to protect human rights, are not to protect dissidents in Iran or China. Tor originated in a US Naval laboratory as a way of protecting spies from surveillance. So imagine if you're conducting an investigation for the FBI and you’re trying to infiltrate, let’s say, an animal rights group on the internet, if you are sitting in an FBI office and you go and register with this forum, the administrator will see your IP address and, if they take the time to trace that, they’ll be like, wait a second, this guy is the Fed. And so, you needed a technology that could hide your information. But the problem was if it's only American agents using this system, it defeats its purpose because it’s like, oh, they’re using Tor, another Fed. So the only way that that system could work was if it's used by as broad a range of people as possible.

    BOB GARFIELD: Aha, make it ubiquitous so that we’re not dimed out by the very fact of being on the platform.

    YASHA LEVINE: Exactly. And that’s what Tor has become. . . .  And to me, what’s interesting about the Tor project is that it shows that the military is so involved in every part of the network that it even controls and develops parts of the network that are supposed to be opposed to it.

    BOB GARFIELD: But that doesn't necessarily mean the government has backdoors to subvert the encryption or the IP address masking, does it?

    YASHA LEVINE: No, not necessarily. . . .

Citizens Defending Libraries just put up an article about Levine’s book: Reading on the Internet vs. Reading a Book You Picked Up Browsing In Your Library: Yasha Levine’s “Surveillance Valley- The Secret Military History of the Internet.”  There we described how Levine, pointing out the oddity of the connection between Tor and the federal government, went into the likelihood of (not very necessary) government backdoors to allow the Tor service to surveil its users, and how TOR may serve “as a `honeypot’ to attract and concentrate more accessibly for evaluation all the communicators who really do want hide significant things from the U.S. government.”

On his own website Yasha Levine wrote about his OTM interview

Yasha Levine himself wrote more about his On The Media interview (quoting from it) and specifically about Tor.

        "My problem with tools like Tor and Signal is that they distract from a bigger problem that exists on the Internet. It is in Google's interest. It is in Facebook's interest to promote Tor and to promote Signal. Because these tools do no threaten their business models. When you use Tor and you log into your Google account or if you log into your Facebook account, Tor does not protect you. Google knows who you are. You just logged into their service. Facebook knows who you are. You just logged into their service. Tor does not protect you from surveillance that happens on the Internet as a matter of routine. It does not protect you from Facebook giving away or selling your data like we've seen with Cambridge Analytica. These tools give people a false sense of privacy. And we don't have any privacy."

        "Tor narrowly protects you when you're browsing the internet, and it's sometimes useful. Signal protects a narrow band of communication — your text messages. It does not protect anything else that happens on your Android phone that siphons up everything it can collect and sends it to Google. What can you do if you want to protect yourself from Google? There is nothing you can do."

        "The NSA does not run its own social media platform. That social media platform is run by Facebook. So we have to focus not just on government surveillance, but on the private telecommunication systems and platforms that make that surveillance possible. And so as a privacy movement, we have to move away from simplistic technological solutions and figure out political solutions because that's the only way we are going to guarantee our privacy."

As our previous post about Mr. Levine’s book noted, his book never mentions by name the concept of a “limited hangout” by the intelligence agencies, but he supplies enough information about people involved with promoting Tor to give cause to wonder who those people may actually be working for when they promote Tor or, alternatively, whether they know they are being used by the Big Brother forces they say they are providing protection against.  In this regard, Levine provides intriguing background stories and details about Jacob Appelbaum, Laura Poitras and Edward Snowden (all of whom are also connected one way or another to Julian Assange).

Whether or not some people might be working as agents of the federal government and intelligence community or are simply being used as tools by them while they, duped, in good faith believe in the benefits of Tor, if Yasha Levine’s various suspicions about Tor are valid, as it appears that they almost certainly are, then it is important to bell this cat for the otherwise unwary.

In June of 2015, right after the On The Media segment featuring them, we contacted the Library Freedom Project and wound up exchanging emails with Alison Macrina because we wanted to exchange information and dig deeper into the subject of library surveillance in general.  We didn’t actually talk with Ms. Macrina, because Ms. Macrina wanted communications to be by email.  Although there were over a dozen emails exchanged back and forth between us the information exchanged was mostly an outflow of what we sent the Library Freedom Project.  We also worked to engage with them via Twitter.

When we sent Ms. Macrina the National Notice article (by Michael D. D. White) about the Snowden revelations and surveillance in the libraries saying that we were interested in “what is  happening in New York City libraries, and why it may be happening” and what besides real estate deals may “also factor into driving what is happening as books are disappearing from our libraries” Ms. Macrina responded that she was “in agreement about all this stuff of course.”   Despite all our ensuing emails we really never got deeper into things than that.

Maybe Ms. Macrina didn’t view our Citizens Defending Libraries interests as truly extending to the same concerns about surveillance the Library Freedom Project said it was addressing, instead of expecting that we'd only take issue with library sell-offs, library contractions and the elimination of books.  (As our post about Yasha Levine’s book makes clear, those contractions and elimination of books are definitely interrelated with surveillance concerns.)

Talking about the way Citizens Defending Libraries addressed and wanted to prevent “closures” Ms. Macrina referred us to Urban Librarians Unite as being similarly interested, but while we said that we didn’t want to get off on the wrong foot with her, we had to explain that Urban Librarians Unite did not want to ally with us to protect the public and that, running into problems with them from the start, we found them consistently on the other side, testifying in favor of the library sales and shrinkages, and promoting keeping library books off-site (actually a surveillance issue itself).  Ms. Macrina communicated that library “closures” was not an “arena” the Library Freedom Project was working in.

Articles About Library Privacy and Surveillance In Libraries

Since our 2015 communications with the Library Freedom Project, however unproductive they may have been, we have not heard from them again although we ourselves have substantially added to the information we have been passing along to the rest of the world about library surveillance, setting up a dedicated page of links about it (Articles About Library Privacy and Surveillance In Libraries), and, among other things, furnishing information from an October 2016 Noticing New York article based on information from the minutes of NYPL trustee meetings:  Snowden, Booz and the Dismantling of Libraries As We Know Them: Why Was A Private Government Spy Agency Hired to Take Apart New York's Most Important Libraries And Turn Them Into Something Else?

We think it suffices to say that there are issues about surveillance in our libraries that need to be pursued much more deeply than they have been and that there are too many unanswered and unpursued questions relating to surveillance in our libraries and why certain things that are happening to our libraries are happening.