On Wed, 06 Aug 2014 00:19:17 +0200 rysiek <rysiek@hackerspace.pl> wrote:
One of the things I have learnt during the years of my brushing shoulders with Teh Gummint (public consultations, conferences, etc) is that a huge bureaucracy like a government is bound to have conflicting interests and fund/take conflicting actions.
Governments are not homogeneous, to say the least.
Governments are pretty homoneneous criminal organizations. The fact that sometimes different government factions within a given government quarrel a bit over the spoils is basically meaningless, from the point of view of government victims at least. In the case of tor - employees of the american nazi military, it should be pretty obvious that they are aligned with american nazi policies, despite their hypocritical alleged support for 'free speech'. By the way, if the american nazi government had to fund something like tor, what would be the best approach? Two options : One, try to do it secretly. Problem is, it's difficult and sooner or later (sooner) people would find out and the project reputation would rightfully suffer. So what to do? Well, hide in plain sight! Get the money openly from the government and brag about how 'transparent' the scam is!! Clever.
So I can see how a government can fund a tool that is useful for one of the departments or agencies, and which at the same time is detrimental to actions of some other department or agency.
As mentioned ad nauseam tor is 'useful' for the 'intelligence' 'community'.
There's no Huge Plan Or Conspiracy behind it. Just Hanlon's razor, if anything.
bla bla bla Name calling! You are a witch! You are a conspiracy theorist!! You hate AMERIKKKAAA!!!! Absolutely none of the government actions are secret. Especially things done by the most brutal faction, the military. Anything the military do is public, published in www.nazis.org and for the common good!!!
Draw your own conclusions based on a weighting of (ability of individuals to hide traffic from the state) / (ability of the state to obfuscate intelligence traffic) and taking into consideration how much smaller the threat model is for a state apparatus with known trusted servers and alternative traffic routes through compromised botnets and embassies around the world.
Yup.
Me, I'm more hopeful for i2p; it's just a pity that it's so oddly put together right now.
Care to elaborate on the "oddly put together" part?