[TLAFanBoy]

Consider that the Tor Foundation itself may have been started by NSA agents and collaborators. Tor was originally invented for the US Navy, after all. There's a foundation that provides legal representation to "average people" who want to run Tor exit nodes. I read a study of Tor exit nodes in Germany and they are all financed and legally represented by a foundation that, to my eyes at least, is obviously a CIA front.

The CIA has been doing things like this since forever. Many of the "storied journalists" of the late 20th century were CIA propagandists. It would be trivially easy for the CIA to turn one of their own assets into a "privacy celebrity." They would go around giving conferences to "privacy advocates" and techies, spinning yarns about their "dedication to user privacy" and the average person would believe it. In fact, the CIA, in the 1950s, used a personality test heuristic that could identify narcissists and liars and would recruit these people to insert into various "movements."

I actually do find it rather amusing when I read comments from seemingly well meaning techies praising some celebrity "privacy activist" that travels around the country giving TED talks and the like, promoting various privacy technology initiatives, never once even considering that it's quite likely that celebrity is working for the NSA and simply mouths all the "progressive" and "cyber-libertarian" talking points that sell the idea to idealists. Idealists are easily manipulated because they "want to believe."

The Three Letter Agencies are "people hackers" more than "technology hackers" and the average techie-type doesn't have a clue.

tl;dr the entire "electronic privacy movement" is likely astroturf run by the intelligence community.

[mimixco]

Very true. I'd recommend Yasha Levine's (the post author's) book Surveillance Valley for anyone interested in this topic.

You'll notice any web posts about "how to get on the dark web" suggest Tor. Uh, huh.

[arthurcolle]

.onion addresses point to hidden services, and I was under the impression that the "dark web" usually just refers to these hidden services. So what other alternatives exist besides "Tor" and associated .onion addresses to access the dark web if its not hidden services?

[earenndil]

There are other 'dark webs'. Most prominent afaik are i2p and freenet (although both of those do something slightly different than tor).

[ryanmercer]

>Consider that the Tor Foundation itself may have been started by NSA agents and collaborators.

.

>never once even considering that it's quite likely that celebrity is working for the NSA

The Tor Foundation itself could also have been founded by Mork from Ork to hide his pornographic consumption from Orson.

I highly doubt either is true, it's probably not some conspiracy. I imagine the bulk of Tor traffic is DNM trade which intelligence agencies just aren't going to care about some 17 year old ordering MDMA for his friends with bitcoin.

[TLAFanBoy]

>The Tor Foundation itself could also have been founded by Mork from Ork to hide his pornographic consumption from Orson.

No, "Mork from Ork" is a fictional character, while the people who started the Tor project and the Tor foundation are real people, and were funded, since the beginning, by the Office of Naval Research and the NSA. In fact, the article goes into this extensively, and these facts are not in question:

>The technology was funded by the Office of Naval Research and DARPA. Early development was spearheaded by Paul Syverson, Michael Reed and David Goldschlag — all military mathematicians and computer systems researchers working for the Naval Research Laboratory, sitting inside the massive Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling military base in Southeast Washington, D.C.

>But in 2002, seven years after it began, the project moved into a different and more active phase. Paul Syverson from the Naval Research Laboratory stayed on the project, but two new guys fresh outta MIT grad school came on board: Roger Dingledine and Nick Mathewson. They were not formally employed by Naval Labs, but were on contract from DARPA and the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory’s Center for High Assurance Computer Systems.

>At the very end of 2004, with Tor technology finally ready for deployment, the US Navy cut most of its Tor funding, released it under an open source license and, oddly, the project was handed over to the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

So creating bizarre strawmen about "Mork from Ork" and using weasel-words like "conspiracy theory" doesn't add anything to the discussion.

>I imagine the bulk of Tor traffic is DNM trade which intelligence agencies just aren't going to care about some 17 year old ordering MDMA for his friends with bitcoin.

This is also a strawman, no one (except for you) was talking about "17 year old ordering MDMA for his friends with bitcoin."

It's interesting that there is so much ostensible "faith" in the Tor Foundation and a seeming emotional reaction to questions about it. I say "ostensible" because my suspicion is those reactions are feigned.

The job of the NSA is signals intelligence; the Tor network is a juicy target for signals intelligence; NSA has been involved in not just the foundational technology of Tor, but the various Tor research projects.

If the NSA does NOT have "back doors" into the Tor network, they aren't doing their job.

[ryanmercer]

> and were funded, since the beginning, by the Office of Naval Research and the NSA. In fact, the article goes into this extensively, and these facts are not in question:

You'll be hard pressed to find someone working at a major university that hasn't (directly or indirectly) received government funding for something. You'll be almost as hard pressed to find a major tech, freight, medical, agricultural, transportation, aerospace, natural resources company etc that hasn't had (or doesn't have active) government contracts.

That doesn't mean everything is a government conspiracy to spy on people.

>The federal government spent $116 billion on research and development (R&D) in 2017,

https://www.cbo.gov/publication/54089

[TLAFanBoy]

>That doesn't mean everything is a government conspiracy to spy on people.

No one suggested that "everything is a government conspiracy to spy on people."

The job of the NSA is to "spy on people." It's America's top funded intelligence agency. It's full of extermely competent and very intelligent people and their employer, the United States of America, is the world's sole superpower, the world's largest economy, and likely the most technologically sophisticated nation of earth.

The NSA is one of the reasons for America's preeminent place in the world.

[ryanmercer]

The NSA is more interested in HVTs at a nation state level, not people selling porn passwords, drugs and cvv2 dumps.

For people attempting to pass communication privately for any purposes an intelligence agency would be interested in, they're almost certainly using things like random in-game chats (this has even been in the news for non-interest stuff like drug trade).

The handful of paranoid people using Tor to check Facebook or google search 'how to poison my lover' aren't the people the NSA is interested in.

The people in oppressive governments using Tor (where it's not blocked) to share images of crime/abuse and political statements are more of interest to agencies like the CIA.

>The NSA is one of the reasons for America's preeminent place in the world.

Hardly. America's preeminent place in the world is a result of access to natural resources, some of the best farmland in the world and a technologically advanced military with a million plus well-equipped active duty personnel and the fact that we don't share borders with a major threat (Canada is not a threat and we co-staff several military installations with Canadian personnel, in fact NORAD is a direct result of mutual-staffing from an agreement made in 1957 and is co-commanded by a USAF and RCAF generals).

Oh, and the whole part where we were the first nuclear power and the only country crazy enough to have used not one, but two, nuclear weapons in aggression.