>> The Tor devs go to great lengths to try to keep "evil" governments from 
>> using Tor against itself. Why not devote some effort toward keeping "evil" 
>> traffic off of Tor? 

I agree. Why not block the most obvious abuse? All professional Apache 
webservers install a module named 'mod_secure' that will filter out trivial 
hacking attempts such as:

   GET /index.php?id=123" OR 1=1
   GET /index.php?file=../../../../../../../etc/passwd

Why not employ similar techniques on a Tor exit? We can be 100% sure about the 
malicious intent. The examples above are not a matter of taste/moral 
conviction/opinion, so why not implement a 'mod_security'-like filter in Tor?

> Define "evil" (or its converse "good"). I'd bet that given any random 
> selection of people in a room you'd get a broad spectrum of views. The only 
> way you can safely meet /all/ those views is not to take a position at all 
> and remain neutral.


Yes, this is a gray area. Moreover, there is not a solid technical solution to 
reliably "label" or "classify" content. However, suppose that in ten years 
technology has advanced and we can reliably classify websites as "gay porn", 
"controversial political views", "child porn", "weapons", etc. Then I see no 
harm in a tor exit operator to choose an exit policy that matches his own moral 
beliefs. Don't forget Tor exits are operated by volunteers that donate time and 
money to provide anonymity and provide access to content they think is 
important to the world and should be freely accessible at all cost.

Others may regard this as censorship, but they are free to operate a Tor exit 
node themselves to provide access to more grim content. Everybody has their own 
reasons to join the torproject. Be it providing access to information for those 
living under an oppressing regime, or because they don't want their health care 
insurance to know what diseases they search on Google, or because they have a 
sexual orientation that is unacceptable in the community they live in. 

Why is it so bad if a Tor exit operator tries to match the use of their node 
with their own moral beliefs?


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