Yikes. As some Tor users may know, the UN drafted the Unified Declaration of Human Rights, which in principle calls for privacy respect and inclusion. That same UN blocks the Tor community from their website. Indeed, being denied access to the text that embodies our human rights is rich in irony.
Well that same UN plans to create a “Global Digital Compact” to protect digital human rights. It’s a good idea, but wow, they just don’t have their shit together. I have so little confidence that they can grasp the problems they are hoping to solve. Cloudflare probably isn’t the least bit worried. Competence prevailing, Cloudflare should be worried, theoretically, but the UN doesn’t have the competence to even know who Cloudflare is.
There are very valid reasons to block tor ips. I would bet a lot of spam and issues comes through tor, because it is effectively free proxies, for whatever malicious thing you have that needs to bypass ip bans.
Not saying the literal UN should be blocking tor, but I can see why they do.
The UN should just open source all that as a GitHub repo with some pandoc magic. Not everything has to be directly served, and honestly, I’d like more of that to be served as data rather than as a service.
Heck, UN bodies spit out repos like it’s their job… which is correct. Machine readable general assemblies even.
There is no valid reason for the United Nations blocking Tor.
A mom & pop shop selling cupcakes would have a valid reason (lack of funding, lack of competence, no conflicting principles). Blocking Tor is a cheap and sloppy attempt at separating ham from spam which inherently entails blocking ham, ultimately against the principles the UN theoretically supports. The UN should have the funding and competence to support their own values.
The UN probably should not be drafting rules about digital inclusion when they themselves have an embarrassing display of digital exclusion.
