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

[Rohan Dixit]

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 <sina.rabbani at gmail.com> 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" <evgeny.morozov at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> Those of you who've read Assange's recent interview with The Rolling
>> Stone<http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/julian-assange-the-rolling-stone-interview-20120118?print=true>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 Cryptome<http://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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