It seems the networking research community has already formed an ethics review board: https://www.ethicalresearch.org/efp/netsec/. Nick Feamster and Philipp Winter are on the board.
Maybe Tor can recommend this for researchers that wish to use Tor instead of forming its own review group?
Aaron
On Oct 8, 2015, at 10:33 AM, Aaron Johnson aaron.m.johnson@nrl.navy.mil wrote:
The idea of that list is to provide specific activities for which the costs are judged not to outweigh the benefits.
Sorry, that should have been "for which the costs are judged *to* outweigh the benefits”.
Also, I should have mentioned that even being on that list wouldn't necessarily be the final word. There could very well be benefits that weren’t properly appreciated. However, observing that your plans are on the list will hopefully help you realize that your plans are potentially dangerous to users, that they are likely to be opposed by key members of the Tor community without effort to change minds beforehand, and that Tor network operators may already be blacklisting relays that are observed participating in such activity. I think that will be a very helpful kind of communication between Tor and researchers that doesn’t exist today.
Best, Aaron