What do we do about banks and other financial institutions excommunicating customers for not toeing the line? I think it’s time to find a way to tell these companies that they’re not too big to fail. Will antitrust laws do it? Will our politicians enforce them? Would love to hear from Bill, Steve, Scott and Zo on this!
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/06/paypal-shuts-down-long-time-tor-supporter-no-recourse
“I tried to make a payment to the hosting company for my server lease in Finland. My account wouldn’t work. I went to my PayPal info page which displayed a large vertical banner announcing my permanent ban. They didn’t attempt to inform me via email or phone—just the banner.”
…and unilateral blocking with no obligation to provide a reason or communicate at all…
“They have an online ‘Resolution Center’ but I never had a dialog with anyone there either.” The PayPal terms reference the Resolution Center as an option, but asserts PayPal has no obligation to disclose details to its users.”
One reply on “Financial Censorship…PayPal Shuts Down Long-Time Tor Supporter with No Recourse”
Meh… I dunno about this in this case. “TOR” is the acronym for “The Onion Router”, so named because it has layer upon layer to peel back and you never really get to the middle of the onion. It’s a protection/anonymizing software something like a VPN. Often it is used in conjunction with a VPN or a local pseudo VPN-like software. The whole purpose is anonymization.
TOR was in fact developed by the U.S. Navy for use in breaching things like the Bamboo Curtain in China and allowing dissidents, activists, and other types not likely to be popular with their government to get out to the world over the internet. Without being sentenced to lengthy prison sentences or executed.
It does this by masking your IP address. You connect to the TOR network through TOR nodes and then it bounces your traffic all over the world to make it difficult or impossible to track down exactly where you are. You’ve seen it in movies, you just maybe didn’t know that’s what you were seeing.
I don’t remember exactly but I think TOR is a couple decades or more old. It’s a free download and anyone can use it.
It’s been a long time since TOR was secure enough to protect dissidents from being tagged and bagged. If you want to run a secure, safe TOR connection you really, really have to know what you’re doing or else you get busted without ever knowing how the suppressive government caught on to you.
I recall a case not too awful long ago where the FBI took down a child pornographer who was using a TOR connection to mask his location. He slipped up and thought he had it right and … He didn’t.
Today it’s mostly used for piracy of digital content and by child pornography vendors and other shady applications. Child pornography on TOR networks is one of the bigger problems and prime sources for that crap. A VPN can still be compromised with probable cause and a warrant so those people really like TOR as a safer alternative.
The thing about TOR is that while the user is anonymous, the nodes are well known and published. So now anyone or any entity like a government that wants to block TOR just blacklists the TOR node’s IP addresses.
It’s gotten a bit seedy out there in TOR Land.
It’s more than probable that this guy got his TOR node(s) busted for piracy or kiddie porn and a complaint was made to PayPal. He also very probably didn’t know that was happening as TOR traffic is encrypted as well as the IP masked. It would absolutely be against the law for PayPal to facilitate that kind of illegal activity, whether the node owner knew about it or not, by paying for rental on a TOR node.
All of that said, please don’t think I’m making excuses for or standing up for PayPal. That’s not my intention at all. They might have let the guy know why his account was blocked. That would seem to be the decent thing to do if there was no criminal activity involved. If that’s the case, then shame on PayPal for just locking him up like that.
Then again, if there is an active investigation underway they probably wouldn’t do that either. No sense in giving a kiddie porn purveyor notice so he can cover his tracks.
It also wouldn’t surprise me one bit to find out that the authorities took over his TOR node and were paying the fees themselves in order to monitor illegal traffic and try to nab a child porno seller or some such other skulduggery. The guy in the story should check to see if his node is still online. That would be a dead giveaway.
It might also be that he was absolutely innocent and unaware of any breach of the law which was occuring on his node and “the powers that be” just were looking for an excuse to shut down TOR for some other reason. Like I said, it’s gotten pretty dank on that system in the last decade or so.
Most people I’ve ever met have no idea what TOR is so if that’s the case it would be easy to find a villain where there isn’t any or miss the real villain out of unfamiliarity with TOR and how it’s used.
If this was an honest merchant in an open system that couldn’t have done anything wrong or illegal, that would be one thing. TOR nodes are not that and are now not often used for good as much as they once were so this whole thing smells a little bit fishy to me.
I guess the point I’m trying to make is that while there is, or likely is, censorship by financial institutions, none of us really want to be supporting the cause of a child pornographer either. Intentionally or otherwise.
My last point would be to advise anyone on this website to use a VPN if they feel the need and stay way, way away from TOR unless they really know their stuff. Running a visible, improperly configured TOR connection is likely to bring unwanted attention from somewhere.