1 research outputs found
Critical infrastructure: a social worlds study of values, design and resistance in Tor and the Tor community
While cybercrime research has become well-established within criminology, there is
very little criminological research which treats the infrastructures and platforms of
the Internet as subjects of criminological enquiry. These are increasingly taking on
responsibility for the governance of large populations of users, and the engineers
and developers of these platforms are increasingly having to navigate problems of
crime, harm, and policing. This thesis explores, through qualitative empirical
research, an Internet infrastructure which has particularly faced these issues: the Tor
Project, an anonymity network which gives millions of users around the world
extremely strong protections against online surveillance and censorship. This has
been an important tool for whistleblowers, journalists, and activists, however it has
also become associated with a range of criminal uses, especially the rise of
‘cryptomarkets’, marketplaces for illegal services and goods accessible through the
Tor network which are very difficult for law enforcement to shut down. I explore how
the Tor community attempt to navigate these issues and how they make sense of
the role Tor plays in society, drawing on interviews with members of the Tor
community, including designers and developers, the people who maintain Tor’s
infrastructure, and others in the Tor community, as well as extensive archival
research in Tor’s online mailing list archives.
I use frameworks from Science and Technology Studies, in particular, social worlds
theory, to explore the values of the Tor community, how they attempt to materialise
them through infrastructure, and the challenges they face in practice. The Tor
community, rather than sharing a strong set of shared values, is in fact a dense
thicket of contradictory values and meanings. Using social worlds theory, I distil this
into three internally-coherent social worlds, each of which makes sense of the work
Tor does differently, rooted in differing practices, sensibilities and understandings of
the political salience of privacy technology. These are: the engineer social world, which views privacy as a structure, understanding privacy technologies as reshaping
the topologies of power in information systems; the activist social world, which views
privacy as a struggle and privacy technologies as part of a political movement; and
finally, the infrastructuralist social world, which views privacy as a service and privacy
technologies as the neutral facilitators of their users’ action.
I explore the relationships between these three social worlds, how they have come
into contact and conflict with one another, and how they have changed over the
years. These each shape Tor’s material form, its attempts to cultivate resilience
against disruption by powerful actors, and how it navigates its implications in crime,
harm, and power in different ways, each of which I explore in detail. Although Tor
represents an attempt to act in the domain of infrastructural power, it has found
that doing politics through design and engineering relies on a lot of hidden work and
complex negotiation in practice, spilling out into the domains of politics,
administration, and governance and becoming caught up in the very technologies of
control which it tries to subvert. I end the thesis with a discussion, drawing from my
empirical research, of Tor’s place in the wider landscape of geopolitics and online
power and how it makes sense of this. I argue that the challenges Tor faces are
reflective of deeper tensions between freedom and control at the heart of liberal
societies and how they are governed