[ambertch]

At Burning Man I met a couple of people who work on the Tor project.

They were brilliant. Honestly it's going to be hard for a govt agency to recruit people like this - people who are incredibly passionate about security and cryptography may tend to care about privacy issues as well, for which the government currently incurs a negative sentiment, and this is compounded by the fact that brilliant people these days tend to work on problems they are ideologically aligned with. This isn't the Manhattan Project era anymore...

But you just never know, people come from all sorts of political backgrounds.

[dillona]

You know that Tor was developed for the navy, right?

[rmc]

re: Manhattan project, I think one difference is that in those days you couldn't use investigate it yourself, you needed the supply and equipment that only TBF government could provide.

Now, a €500 laptop (which people have for sending email) can provide most of what you need to be world class. If you have the brains, you don't need the government.