[tor-talk] NSA supercomputer

[Paul Syverson]

*sigh* at the risk that I am feeding a troll rather than helping
someone wellmeaning but misinformed and the hope that some will find
these points useful despite their having been made many times before:

1. Tor not TOR  (See
   https://www.torproject.org/docs/faq.html.en#WhyCalledTor )

2. was created at NRL, by which I mean by myself (U.S. govt. employee)
   and Roger and Nick (working with me at the time as subcontractors
   for the U.S. govt.)

3. NRL is not nor ever has been a part of DARPA. DARPA is a funding
   agency that funds research at universities, private companies, and
   yes at NRL. NRL is the U.S. Navy's corporate research laboratory.
   (One of the oldest corporate research laboratories operating at
   this point.)  See https://www.nrl.navy.mil. NRL scientists have
   built lots of useful stuff besides onion routing and Tor that you
   probably use every day, such as GPS. The first chapter of _Pushing
   the Horizon_ gives a fair overview of NRL research culture, and
   history through 1998
   (https://www.nrl.navy.mil/content_images/horizon.pdf) Although it
   doesn't mention NRL's patent on the joystick controller in 1923 ;>)

4. Not sure who "they" is, but the fact that Tor was created at NRL
   does not carry the implications you suggest. And we worked hard to
   make that so. Since its beginnings in 1995 we argued that to
   provide the intended protection for Navy and other government
   communications, onion routing networks had to carry traffic for
   others, must let others run parts of the infrastructure, and must
   run open source code so others could inspect it to know they could
   trust it. We obtained our first publication release for the source
   for an onion routing system in 1996. See
   https://www.acsac.org/2011/program/keynotes/syverson.pdf 
   Thus the development and deployment process was designed from the
   beginning to preclude the sort of concerns you are
   implying. Continuing to the present day, Tor design, development
   process, and software is transparent, well documented, and heavily
   scrutinized by a variety of people with diverse goals and
   interests.

5. This is a response to the comment immediately below from Gregory
   Disney. I'm not going to try to address everything mentioned in the
   thread, although Nick gave a fine answer to the question about key
   length.

HTH,
Paul

On Thu, Apr 04, 2013 at 01:55:40PM -0400, Gregory Disney wrote:
> Just saying TOR was created by the Naval Research Laboratory a part of
> DARPA. Since it's inception they could index, spider and track the dark
> net.
> 
> 
> On Thu, Apr 4, 2013 at 1:08 PM, grarpamp <grarpamp at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> > > Guys, if you are in trouble with NSA, or other US governmentals agency,
> > > you're screwed. Physically. Don't mind your electronical com'.
> >
> > Very good calibration sir :)
> > And come to think of it, being in such trouble might not be so bad,
> > you might find yourself with a lucrative job offer you can't refuse ;)
> > Vacuuming under the floor tiles at a giant datacenter perhaps...
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> >
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