[tor-talk] Why corrupt government officials are strongly opposed to this Tor project (a Gestapo government run amok!)

[Jonathan Wilkes]

On 03/05/2015 12:28 AM, Mirimir wrote:
> On 03/03/2015 01:17 AM, Lara wrote:
>> Travis Bean:
>>> I am giving everyone on this mailing list a heads-up regarding what I
>>> have uncovered about the Gestapo government here in the United States
>>> and why corrupt government officials are so strongly opposed to this Tor
>>> project.
>> You have no idea what Gestapo was troll.
> You know that many former Gestapo were recruited by the US and CCCP,
> don't you? Those programs weren't as public as the ones for scientists.

The OP writes about widely known digital surveillance and political 
corruption,
then seems to conclude that both are aimed at his own personal activity.
The missing threads that would otherwise connect the two plus the heightened
language lead me to believe a conspiracy theory is at play here.

Mirimir identified one troubling idiosyncracy of this particular conspiracy
theory-- some of the language is not as hyperbolic as it appears on first
read.  I'd also suggest reading the Wikipedia "History" section of the 
"Gestapo"
page, and have a healthy dose of worries over the parallels with 
post-911 U.S.
militarization of domestic police.  It should go without saying that 
there's no
moral equivalency between the two, _and_ that it would an exercise in
self-defeat to wait until moral equivalences develop before daring to study
history.

But I'd like to point out another troubling idiosyncracy.  When 
anti-vaccinators,
creationists et al. take their left turns, the reasonable among us 
typically fault
them for ignoring the prohibitive expense of the detour.  As Neil deGrasse
Tyson once said, for as much as it would have cost to fake a moon 
landing you
might as well just have spent the money to go to the moon.  It would be at
least as expensive to fabricate decades of independent vaccine research 
across
however many countries, or for the implications of an erronenous biological
theory to coincidentally be verified across so many disparate fields of 
scientific
inquiry.

But what would it cost the NSA to screw with the devices of a guy 
running and
distributing scripts for use with Tor?

Like the other respondent, I think it's unlikely the OP devices are 
being targetted
or exploited, and I suggest the OP seek out therapy to cope with the 
anxiety created
by believing that they are.  (As well as the vicious cycle I imagine 
coming from the
virtual smorgasborg of surveillance tactics one can read about from the 
past year
and a half of leaks.)

But I'd also suggest that after he goes, he comes back here and shares 
any coping strategies
he learned.  Because until it costs more than nothing to trigger 
targetted surveillance,
that's essentially what we're all doing.

Best,
Jonathan

>
> <SNIP>