and more! pando.com/2014/11/14/tor-smear/ "Perhaps it’s somewhat understandable that salaried Tor developers like Andrea Shepard and Jacob Appelbaum went on the attack......Both Appelbaum and Shepard circulate in radical anti-police state circles, and my article pointed out that they earn $100,000-plus annual salaries working for a nonprofit federal government security contractor—a nonprofit that gets at least three-quarters of its annual funding from the Pentagon, State Department, and other federal agencies. In other words, Tor anti-National Security State rebels are living off the largesse of their NatSec State nemesis." "Morgan Marquis-Boire, a former Googler who was recently poached by Pierre Omidyar to run security at First Look, called me a loony conspiracy theorist for reporting on Tor’s government funding—but then contradicted himself by arguing that this “conspiracy theory” is a matter of public record. It was a baffling, oxymoronic argument to make—accusing my article of being both a wild conspiracy theory, yet also boring old news that no one should bother reading—but for some reason, Tor defenders thought this self-contradiction made perfect logical sense:" "As it turned out, Halpin, like the Tor developers and their defenders, had other reasons to try to discredit reporting on funding and conflicts-of-interest. Halpin is the president of LEAP, a small privacy/encryption outfit that gets most of its funding from various government sources—including more than $1 million from Radio Free Asia’s “Open Technology Fund.” This fund just happens to be a major financial backer of the Tor Network; last year alone, the Open Technology Fund gave Tor $600,000. The fund also happens to be run out of the Broadcasters Board of Governors (BBG), an old CIA spinoff dedicated to waging propaganda warfare against regimes hostile to US interests. The BBG—which until recently was called the International Broadcasting Bureau—has also been one of the biggest backers of Tor going back to 2007." "No wonder all these people are so upset by my reporting. They’ve branded themselves as radical activists fighting The Man and the corporate surveillance apparatus—while taking money from the US government’s military and foreign policy arms, as well as the biggest and worst corporate violators of our privacy. By branding themselves as radical activists, they appear to share the same interests as the grassroots they seek to influence; exposing their funding conflicts-of-interests makes it hard for them to pose as grassroots radicals. So instead of explaining why getting funding from the very entitities that Tor is supposed to protect users from is not a problem, they’ve taken the low road to discredit the very idea of reporting on monetary conflicts-of-interests as either irrelevant, or worse, a sign of mental illness."