[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.