Tor

[Meredith L. Patterson]

On Mon, Jun 30, 2014 at 02:52:37AM +0200, Lodewijk andré de la porte wrote:
> Tor is funded by the US government, not the US military per se. The same US
> gov is funding research and efforts of breaking it.

Yup. Not only that, .gov organisations all have their own budgets and
spending authority, most of them don't talk to each other, and a lot
of them don't like each other. USG may be a hydra, but it's a hydra
whose heads are so badly tied in knots that noticeable things only
happen when one of the heads gets itself some wiggle room.

Also, neither "government funding" or even "DoD funding" *necessarily*
imply that DoD has any say over what ships. I don't think I'm the only
Cyber Fast Track participant on this list, but
https://github.com/UpstandingHackers/hammer was funded through CFT,
and anyone is welcome to audit the source and read the commit logs; I
can tell you who all the committers are, most aren't American, and the
ones who are are me and my partner. Our interaction with DoD (or,
well, our contract facilitator) consisted of "Here's the latest
milestone" --> "make && make check worked, here's the money for that
milestone" every few months. That's all.

I hear some variation on the "Tor is a government op!" drum banged
every six months or so, so I guess it was time. Can we at least get
some variation this time, maybe spin some conspiracy theories about
Paul Syverson instead of falling back on that tired old canard about
Roger's internship? Or aliens? Working Area51 in would be cool.

(Disclaimer: of course I don't think Syverson is a plant, nor do I
think Tor is a honeypot. Do not harass Paul Syverson or his family, or
the least I will do will be to throw a habanero martini in your face.)

Cheers,
--mlp