----- Forwarded message from [email protected] ----- From: [email protected] Date: Thu, 1 Dec 2011 12:32:07 -0500 To: Liberation Technologies <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [liberationtech] Not another Haystack right? User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.20 (2009-06-14)
On Tue, Nov 29, 2011 at 07:42:14PM -0800, [email protected] wrote 33K bytes in 765 lines about: : 1) Brian Conley's question about why BBG's support to Tor does not seem to : undermine Tor. If you do not trust Tor, do not use it. If you do not trust Jake, Roger, me, and others at Tor, then do not use our software. If you are able to review the code, designs, and empirical evidence of people successfully using Tor in dangerous situations, then please make your own decision as to whether you should use Tor. I can talk endlessly about transparency, free software, open code, designs, published research, published data, etc. But none of this matters if your mindset is that Tor is a mouthpiece of the US Government. Being under surveillance by the DoJ is just a ruse, clearly. But everyone likes Sweden, right? What if Saudi Arabia funded us? For me, I use Tor daily, for just about everything. It works. I used Tor before I met Roger and Nick. If Tor goes off the rails and gets involved in actual conspiracies, then I'll quit and move on. I think everyone at Tor would do the same. We produce technology. How people use it is up to them. Tor does not focus on any one country. We focus on attacks and defenses in the computer security sense of the words. If one country successfully attacks Tor via DH parameter blocking, chances are others will try that too. We resolve the attack and move on. There's always a new attack or novel way someone will try to break Tor; some real, some imagined, some merely created for the global press. Some countries, like Iran, Syria, China, and others are better at electronic repression than others. We find the technology interesting and are involved in an arms race. We want to make sure Tor works in these more-advanced situations. We also respond to where users ask us for help. I've been involved with Tunisia a bit for years. I'm involved in others that 90% of the world doesn't care about enough to keep them in the press. I can understand how it looks like we're focusing on one country over another. I do work with victims of stalking and domestic violence in America. I've met former sex slaves from Eastern Europe and educated them on Internet privacy and anonymity.Others work with LGBT youth, some with law enforcement officers globally, some just focus on the technology because they find it interesting. Clearly we need to be better at communitcating what we do and where we do it. We publish our monthly progress for everyone, https://archive.torproject.org/monthly-report-archive/ and on the blog, https://blog.torproject.org/category/tags/progress-report. Comically, I have to email it to our US Government funders because they cannot get to torproject.org without using Tor or violating their own IT policies. The core of the angst here is that Tor receives US Government and Swedish Government funding. We publish this every year. Our 990, audit statements, and State of Massachusetts Form PC are all published and on our website. The 990 is a public document by law. If you want to see how much funding we get, who we pay, and who pays us, feel free. It's all right here, https://www.torproject.org/about/financials.html.en. We get paid to work on research and development on a defined project and deliverable basis. We publish our deliverables and current work state at https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/sponsors. Now, let's talk about what being a US Government sub-contractor is like. Here's a typical day in my life (imagine Ke$ha's Tik Tok as the soundtrack to this exposé): I wake up in the morning and talk to Hills about the world (Hillary and I are on nickname basis). We talk about code. We talk about how we can use the C coding language to produce more freedom and democracy in the world. She tells me about this new library she read about on reddit/r/programming called libfreedom. She has her staff remind me to avoid buffer overflows in the libfreedom integration. I decide noon is a fine time to get out of bed, take a walk on the beach, and hop into my helicopter to fly to the palatial tor offices in a secret location. I could have taken the Bugatti today, but I figure it is more green to fly directly there. And then General Alexander calls me and gives me the run down on the plans for the day and asks for feedback. Keith and I have a lulzy chat about the Internet memes trending and then renew our bets about who can get on cryptome or pgpboard first today. And then Wen J from China skypes me and trolls me that they are going to roll out a new GFW today that is super duper good at blocking all encryption. Wen is doing it for the lulz. And if you believe the last four paragraphs, well, then I'm sorry for you. Are we done with the conspiracy theories? Or shall I talk about the secret moon base we're building so the grey's can have interplanetary anonymity? -- Andrew pgp key: 0x74ED336B _______________________________________________ liberationtech mailing list [email protected] Should you need to change your subscription options, please go to: https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech If you would like to receive a daily digest, click "yes" (once you click above) next to "would you like to receive list mail batched in a daily digest?" You will need the user name and password you receive from the list moderator in monthly reminders. Should you need immediate assistance, please contact the list moderator. Please don't forget to follow us on http://twitter.com/#!/Liberationtech ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org";>leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE _______________________________________________ tor-talk mailing list [email protected] https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-talk
