[tor-project] Help brainstorm Tor myths

teor teor2345 at gmail.com
Fri Jul 7 02:44:02 UTC 2017


> On 7 Jul 2017, at 10:42, Roger Dingledine <arma at 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)

teor2345 at gmail dot com
PGP C855 6CED 5D90 A0C5 29F6 4D43 450C BA7F 968F 094B
ricochet:ekmygaiu4rzgsk6n
------------------------------------------------------------------------

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 801 bytes
Desc: Message signed with OpenPGP
URL: <http://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-project/attachments/20170707/b5486a51/attachment.sig>


More information about the tor-project mailing list