more blasphemy

[Juan]

	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."