Two relays on the network caught my eye that had popped up in the last 24 hours:
https://metrics.torproject.org/rs.html#search/as:AS132203
Is it alright to run relays on a not so privacy friendly ISP (Tencent, owned by the Chinese goverment)?
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I think that people often associate tencent with the Chinese government due to the overall control the Chinese government exerts over large companies. However, consider the possibility that tencent is operating a tor relay to themselves subvert their own government’s surveillance. If that is the case, they would be a Tor user and relay provider same as any other user or relay provider.
Also keep in mind that governments around the world use small-t tor too as part of their secure communication toolkits, which may be implemented as a “dark-network”, or could piggy-back on the public-facing tor network as well.
Finally, middle relays are arguably the least-sensitive relay node, since they know nothing about the user’s connection to the Tor network nor the users exit destination, so Tencent running a middle node on its own is not really too alarming. Even if that node became a guard node, and we make the assumption that the Chinese government is trying to spy on Chinese users, I’m not sure there would be much effect on Chinese users, since they would likely be using pluggable transports or snowflake to connect to the guard nodes, which would appear as traffic from outside China.
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