From: Zenaan Harkness <zen@freedbms.net>
On Tue, Aug 02, 2016 at 06:51:03PM -0700, Spencer wrote:
>> >jim bell:
>> >the lack of improvements over time
>> This seems to stem more from a misplaced understanding of what design is, on
>> the developers side, since non-protocol improvements get ignored, too.
>They have explicitly stated that certain features, including chaff fill
>packets at the protocol layer, have been not granted funding.
It occurs to me that this may reflect their misunderstanding of the process. (Misunderstanding
by sympathetic employees of the Tor project., or possibly they were misled.) I have
no doubt that Congress would be capable of writing a funding bill for Tor that
is sufficiently specific and detailed to absolutely prohibit any improvements to
Tor. However, I strongly doubt that the funding is limited in that way.
Rather, I suspect that the funding doesn't explicitly state within the grant of funding that
cites chaff fill, etc. is covered. If the Executive branch WANTED to do those projects, they
would simply direct some of their funding to those projects. Instead, I think the higher-ups
may be deliberately misleading the lower-level people about what they could do,
if they decided to do it.
I see that quite recently, Congress has asked them to find out ways to prevent "bad people"
from using Tor. (Probably without defining the term "bad people" sufficiently. Maybe we are
all, automatically, "bad people.")
Notice that the goal is very poorly defined, so the task is inherently vague and the solution will
be similarly vague and imprecise, providing much cover for the entire project.
Perhaps the solution will be that the Tor project team will study how to insert "anti-bad-people"
chaff into the Tor streams, increase the number of hops (more to confuse the "bad people"; they
confuse the hell out of me!), etc.
Eventually, they will have to sadly announce that they haven't yet fully succeeded in preventing
"bad people" from using Tor, but they HAVE greatly improved security in various ways.
Jim Bell