On 7 Jul 2017, at 10:42, Roger Dingledine arma@mit.edu wrote:
- "I heard the Navy wrote Tor originally (so how can we trust it)."
(They didn't. I wrote it.)
...
- "I heard Tor gets most of its money from the US government."
(Alas, this one is true. We have three categories of funding: basic research like from NSF, R&D like from the Open Technology Fund, and deployment and training like from the State Dept. See the financial documents that we publish for details. Alternatives would sure be swell.)
On these topics, you may find Section 2 of POC||GTFO 0x06 interesting, here's a representative quote:
Tor, as you already know if you read its About page, was originally funded as a US Navy research project, and is still occasionally funded by some clue- ful parts of the US government that care about people getting news and other info that their governments happen to not approve of. Given that this sermon got to you neighbors by traveling for at least some of its path along a series of tubes ordered by another US military research agency, it is not surprising that such clue still exists; let’s hope that it persists, neigh- bors, as we sure could use more of it, the way things are generally going in those quarters these days.
Thanks to this clue, and also to the selfless ded- ication of Tor developers who made this project go the way few government-funded projects ever do, we have the Internet-scale equivalent of a Large Hadron Collider for low-latency onion routing. Unlike the LHC, this experiment is not just open to the pub- lic, but also immediately useful. Which is where the “revelations” come in: are “evil scientists” tricking the public?
Luckily, Tor is science, and totally open science at thatthe best kind that hides nothing. It requires no permission or special access to be attacked in the only meaningful way that scientific claims are questioned and their subject-matter is improvedby experiment. Indeed, many good neighbors did so and helped im- prove itand you should read their papers, because their work is nifty[1].
[1]: Especially because it’s all open-access. Please enjoy the Freehaven Selected Papers in Anonymity. http://www.freehaven.net/anonbib/
Source: https://www.alchemistowl.org/pocorgtfo/pocorgtfo06.pdf (many mirrors exist)
T -- Tim Wilson-Brown (teor)
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