Re: [liberationtech] Assange's claim about Tor losing US government support due to WikiLeaks

Thanks for the clarification, Andrew. It's dicey navigating the politics of grant funding in a quasi-public forum like this one, but thanks for the sincere effort. As a disclaimer, I'm completely out of the loop (nor was I ever in it, actually) but I'd guess the federal government believes organizations like Wikileaks are not in their long-term interests. Given the political-economic context this is all happening in, it doesn't seem entirely implausible that grant committees look more favorably on non-controversial applicants. Whether or not that's the case here is probably irrelevant.. By chance, I had the opportunity to read a paper on Cryptome purported to come from Mr. Assange. He describes a conspiratorial government as a connected network, with "leaks" (a la Wikileaks) as methods of making links between the network harder to effectively form and communicate across. I wonder if anyone has any thoughts on it. It seemed to me that the logical consequence of this idea is a completely open surveillance of all members of government, i.e. "sousveillance" (sous- below) as opposed to "surveillance" (surv- spying from "above"). It's curious that things like releasing candidates' tax records, and the larger and larger public scrutiny of politicians generally, shows that this process is happening naturally regardless. Here's a link to the Cryptome PDF: http://cryptome.org/0002/ja-conspiracies.pdf Best, Rohan On Sun, Feb 19, 2012 at 12:28 PM, SiNA wrote:

can you explain why this news is such a big deal? who cares what cryptom thinks?

Why do so many people hate Jake and Tor? On Feb 19, 2012 10:41 AM, "Evgeny Morozov" wrote:

...

Those of you who've read Assange's recent interview with The Rolling Stonehttp://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/julian-assange-the-rolling-stone-i...may have noticed this claim (in response to a question about forms of pressure that US government exerted on WikiLeaks and their supporters):

The Tor Project, which protects people around the world from being spied

...

on or censored, lost some $600,000 to the U.S. government, as a result of one of their people, Jacob Appelbaum, having filled in for me once at a conference in New York. This type of indirect pressure has been applied to a great many people.

I was a bit puzzled by it. So were people at Cryptomehttp://cryptome.org/2012/01/0053.htm, who asked Tor about it. Here is what Andrew Lewman (who's on this list) wrote to them:

I read this statement as well. It is news to me that we were penalized for Jacob. Maybe wikileaks has unreleased information from one of our USG funders. If so, they should publish it for all to review.

Now, Andrew's statement is carefully worded, i.e. it does allow for the possibility that Tor lost the USG money but they think it was not Jacob/WikiLeaks-related.

So it would be good to know whether a) Tor did lose some or all of USG support between late 2010 and early 2012? and b) there is any evidence to link this to WL, as Assange did?

Whatever the motivation, USG cutting support to circumvention tools is a big news item all in itself, regardless of the link to Assange. I wonder why it wasn't more widely reported, if true - perhaps, by Tor project itself?- because ultimately this would all be visible on Tor's financial statements.

Evgeny

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