Hello,
We would like to host a Tor relay in our public institution. However, we are pretty sure that we will be detected and forbiden, unless we can give some guarantees about the use made of our relay.
So, my question is: is there any way to limit the transit on our relay to containts allowed in our own country ? As we are planning to host such a relay to help Ukrain (providing information to Russain people), we could also limit the traffic to a collection of web sites useful for free information.
So, is Tor project intrinsically libertarian, and thus we should provide access to any kind of traffic, including criminals ones, or are there ways to limit it ?
Thanks
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A wider philosophical discussion on Tor is of course interesting and, I think, very welcome, but please know this: relays should not censor websites. If you are going to act as a censor, please do not provide a Tor relay.
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In our case, this is no philosophy. No public institution here will likely allow a relay allowing any kind of data to transit. So, if the price to help Russian people to avoid censorship is to provide means to criminal activities, this will indeed be no. One should be able to choose the level of contribution given to Tor. I have seen exit nodes may be parametrized. May be this can be done also for relays ?
This is possible on Exit-Nodes, since they know the destination of the connection. A middle or guard relay knows only where the connection came from and where the next hop is, but not where the destination is or even what kind of traffic it moves. That is the whole point of the network.
There are other projects from public institutions who run relays. For example libraries Tor at the Heart: Library Freedom Project | The Tor Project and many universities. Maybe that helps you to convince your higher ups to run a relay even if it is possible, that it also helps criminals.
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If you want to help Russians, that may be blocked from accessing Tor relays, consider running a bridge or a snowflake proxy.
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I also recommend reading this section about abuse:
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Thanks for these tips: could you indicate any of these universities ? I could not determine that the library freedom project hosts bridges in public institutions.