*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 <grarp...@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... > > _______________________________________________ > > tor-talk mailing list > > tor-talk@lists.torproject.org > > https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-talk > > > _______________________________________________ > tor-talk mailing list > tor-talk@lists.torproject.org > https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-talk _______________________________________________ tor-talk mailing list tor-talk@lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-talk
