[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.