Robert you're amazingly naive. I guess that's why we're in good hands here at the Zone.

If a maker of handguns claims he is protecting the masses, and then goes ahead and distributes them to the 'hood' - is this a good guy in your book? If this guy now wants to help law enforcement by turning around and selling his customers names and addresses is he a "hero?"

COTDC are folks who profit from the cultivated anarchist image, while raking in bucks from the system they claim to decry. That's not genuine anarchism that's hypocrisy: Predatory Capitalism.

COTDC are much like the leftist who sells a book decrying capitalism, while collecting his royalty check. The Al Frankens, Garafolos and other career hypocrites out to make a capitalist buck by exploiting the left.

I'm afraid I have nothing good to say about them. Like someone who invents a new way to kill people, and then posts it to the internet, COTDC has caused massive suffering, invasion of privacy and indirectly, killed folks. Sure they may have saved someone somewhere along the way but its a 95:5 negative bias.

The data collected via the back orifice tools alone has invaded more folks privacy than 'big brother' and everything including blackmail, fraud, identity theft, robbery have been the results of their "activism".

Freeware like this that logs into a remote server everytime you use it is just asking for trouble. Let's face it the folks who want to use an anonymizer do so for a reason and the firms exploit this to track their surfing (mostly p0rn) and keep a server log of their activities. Folks are much safer just surfing the web with their dial-up or whatever if they are concerned about privacy.

They can run these servers free and handle tons of traffic because they will profit proportionately to the amount of data they collect and sell.

Groups like COTDC are often fronts for ex-agency folks who now make a living selling this data collected to the government. The government has laws protecting the citizens that the private sector need not employ. Naturally once you work for the govt in a certain capacity, you realize the government is a big buyer of private sector data, and you can make more money on the outside than the inside. The government pay premiums for such "shady internet activity" which has been legally privately collected and groups like COTDC are the ultimate cynical exploiters of the very groups they pretend to champion.

Since 9/11 these groups are used by the CIA, DOHS, et al and they collect data now for them. Tracking a wanna-be terrorist using a proxy to disseminate hate, cracking a kidy p0rn ring, or tracking the human slave trade in Europe and Russia, the governments are some of the biggest customers of 'private sector' COTDC hacking tools and "freeware" anonymizer services.

Anti-spyware, anonymizers - all can be classified with the 'safe and sane' description of fireworks. 'Unsafe and insane' use of explosive devices matches up with 'spyware' and 'information gatherers' when the truth be known.