Go To Hellman: Sci-Hub, LibGen, and Total Information Awareness

"'Good thing downloads NOT trackable!' was one twitter response to my post imagining a skirmish in the imminent scholarly publishing copyright war. 'You wish!' I responded. Sooner or later, such illusions of privacy will fail spectacularly, and people will get hurt. I had been in no hurry to see what the Sci-Hub furor was about. After writing frequently about piracy in the ebook industry, I figured that Sci-Hub would be just another copyright-flouting, adware-infested Russian website. When I finally took a look, I saw that Sci-Hub is a surprisingly sophisticated website that does a good job of facilitating evasion of research article paywalls ... I also observed how easy it would be to track all the downloads being made via Sci-Hub. Today's internet is an environment where someone is tracking everything, and in the case of Sci-Hub, everything is being tracked.  My follow-up article was going to describe all the places that could track downloads via Sci-Hub, and how easy it would be to obtain a list of individuals who had downloaded or uploaded a Sci-Hub article – in violation of the laws currently governing copyright. But Sci-Hub is not doing things in the usual way of pirate websites. They're actually working to improve  user privacy. Around the time of my last post, they implemented HTTPS (SSLLabs grade: B) on their website. So instead of inducing users to announce their downloading activity to fellow WiFi users and every ISP on the planet, which is what Sci-Hub was doing in February, today Sci-Hub only registers download activity with Yandex Metrics, the Russian equivalent of Google Analytics.  As long as you trust a Russian internet company to NEVER monetize data about you by selling it to people with more money than good sense, you're not being betrayed by Sci-Hub. Unless the data SOMEHOW falls into the wrong hands ...  History suggests that copyright owners will eventually try to sue or otherwise monetize downloaders, and will be successful. In today's ad-network-created Total Information Awareness environment, it might even be a viable business model ... The best solution for a user wanting to download articles privately is to use the Tor Browser and Sci-Hub's onion address,http://scihub22266oqcxt.onion. Onion addresses provide encryption all the way to the destination, and since SciHub uses LibGen's onion address for linking, neither connection can be snooped by the network. Google and Yandex still get informed of all download activity, but the Tor browser hides the user's identity from them. ...Unless the user slips up and reveal their identity to another web site while using Tor ..."