2. Tor Bridge Distribution & OONI’s Data Collector

   
   

   Last week, I went to China, for the first — and possibly the last — time.

   Later, when I feel like complaining, I’ll blog about the negative things, like the evidence that someone had broken into mine and another Tor developer’s hotel room. As well as the tale of being followed by multiple plainclothes people through the streets of Kowloon, again with another Tor developer, down alleys, in and out of cabs, through electronic stores where I loudly and openly bought tiny audio/video devices to bug myself and the hotel room with. This is the first time I’ve ever worn a wire (I know, they all say that, right?): it doesn’t feel right. I felt the compulsion to warn people who walked up and started talking to me, before they spoke. And even then I still felt dirty and creepy.

   

   When I started officially working on things for the Tor Project a couple years ago, I’d imagined that the world was like a map in an RPG, and that there were a lot of dark, hazy spots that needed filling in. I worried that, if my legal name was publicly attached to Tor, that places like China, Iran, and Syria would always remain dark spots. The idea that I might be prevented from seeing and experiencing those cultures and regions firsthand, that I would not be able to see the homelands of people I wanted to empower, merely because a (corrupt would be redundant) government had gotten wise to some name I don’t answer to — it seemed daunting, and a bit heartbreaking.

   

   I’ve been thinking a lot more about borders lately. Ashamed as I am to admit it (it’s not like I was ever in favour of having borders), until now I’ve held a very privileged perspective on them. Sure, borders suck. Got it. Yep, people should be allowed to work wherever they want. Freedom of association, right? And yet it had never occurred to me: that an invisible line drawn in the sand could keep you away from your home, or that an arbitrary date on a slip of paper could decide how long you were permitted to see someone you loved.

   After living in Germany and France for precisely the number of days my tourist visa would allow, (Oops. I’d been counting, and thought I was still a week under. I should probably script that.) I took off for Hong Kong, where OpenITP had generously offered me a travel grant to attend the third Censorship Circumvention Summit. Jumping from France to China to somewhere-undetermined-that-is-not-Schengen definitely presented some interesting security challenges, since I had to take all of the things I own with me. (It all fits in a backpack, so it’s not a space/money issue, it’s a

   “%&$#@! I’m carrying devices which normally have access to thousands of computers, including some Tor Project infrastructure and repositories, and I have to keep them safe from a government …

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3. Rio de Janeiro

   
   

   I’m in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

   A fourteen year old boy tries to sell me a ride in his cab for twice the price. I take another cab.

   Most of the federal police are smaller than I, but a group of them size me up with amusement in their eyes. Last year, they killed thirteen hundred people in this city.

   Shirtless men wander on the freeway, selling pele porco frita between the cars. Others ride 100cc dirt bikes with furniture stacked on the back.

   An unbridled horse eats trash in a field surrounded by favelas with sun-bleached coloured sheets for roofs.

   There is a white cathedral on a distant hill, and vultures circling over an open crude oil pit.

   That infamous captain of zeppelins, Santos-Dumont, built an enchanted house somehwere in those hills.

   The cab breaks down. The driver pulls over and cranks the engine, cursing.

   Impossible black crags rise above the visible heat waves from the distant jungle. I feel stupid: twenty hours in a flying sardine can, and now the humidity — I can’t give the species name for any of the plants in sight, and my Portuguese vocabulary is three: sim, não, & obrigarda.

   It’s the dead of winter here, but you’d never know it.

   Ah wait, that’s a jacaranda.

   There appears to be a statue on a distant mountain: a robed white figure raising arms and face to the cloudless azure sky. Fleets of teal, red, and ochre sailboats scatter on the lagoon beneath a cablecar dangling between two cliffs rising out of the sea.

   

   I’ve just arrived for RightsCon and Freebird, and also to meet with two friends to discuss how we’ll spend the the rest of this year working on OONI. I’m going to go explore now.

   

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4. Italia

   
   

   I’m sitting in a cottage in the Italian countryside outside Florence, eating a breakfast of cafe brewed in an antique mocha, fette biscottate con riso with vegan hazelnutella and arance amare, a spread of bitter oranges. Outside the lead-paned window with iron fittings, I can see hills covered with vineyards, and a haze of clouds below covers a snowy valley with forested mountains in the distance. The floors and roof are both constucted of bricks and timbers, and a castlemonte woodstove creaks and crackles behind me.

   Last night I shared a sleeping compartment on a night train from Munich with four noisy Estonians and a cute Italian hacker boy, who cuddled next to me reading white papers on homomorphic cryptography. He works on Tor, and also writes screenplays and acted in an Italian television series.

   We hiked through the countryside, through olive orchards, practicing mentalist magic on kachi trees with rotten fruits, daring them to drop to the ground. We marched through the keep of a fortress older than the country I was born in.

   I don’t want to go home. Or rather, I’ve rediscovered that my home is a terrible place.

   

   Via via vieni via con me. Niente più ti lega a questi luoghi Paolo Neanche questi fiori azzuri. Via via Neanche questo tempo grigio, pieno di musiche Conte e di uomini che ti son piaciuti. Via via vieni via con me. Entra in questo amore buio, non perderti per niente al mondo. Via via non perderti per niente al mondo. Lo spettacolo darti varia di uno innamorato di te. Via via vieni via con me. Conte entra in questo amore buio pieno di uomini. Via via entra e fatti un bagno caldo. Via cè un accappatoio azzurro. Fuori piove, è un mondo freddo.

   

   

   

   

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