[ippisl]

I wonder if it is used as a pressure release valve for anonymity software developers. That way they focus their efforts on tor, which might be more amenable to USG exploits, than other anonymity networks.

One relevant data point:the author of mixminion remailer is working for the tor project,probably killing mixminion(a far more secure anonymizer).

Another relevant data point(for a similar strategy): Most of the research on JPEG steganography is done on grayscale images, which is mostly useless since mostly nobody sends grayscale images. Alot of What's done on color images is being done in places like iran, china and india(?).

[wfn]

> One relevant data point:the author of mixminion remailer is working for the tor project,probably killing mixminion(a far more secure anonymizer).

Do you mean Nick Mathewson or Roger Dingledine? Both are working for Tor now, as a matter of fact Roger was one of the core founders of Tor, and both of them co-founded the Tor Project as a nonprofit (though not sure of details).

For what it's worth (ahem, 0%), I believe both of them have very high ethical standards and are great people; I've only physically met them in passing so far, but insofar as I can trust an individual person, I do trust they do not have any secondary ulterior motives.

> probably killing mixminion(a far more secure anonymizer).

I'm not sure of details here, either. Both of them view Tor as, ultimately, a compromise between usability and security. This was a deliberate choice. Tor webpage makes it clear that Tor is not an ultimate ends to anonymity and privacy. I do agree that Mixminion, assuming other factors are kept to be invariant, is more secure. However, if only very few people were to use it, that would make it much less secure (as I'm sure you understand); etc. etc.

> Another relevant data point(for a similar strategy): Most of the research on JPEG steganography is done on grayscale images, which is mostly useless since mostly nobody sends grayscale images. Alot of What's done on color images is being done in places like iran, china and india(?).

I've heard about this - if this proves to indeed be the case, then yeah, kind of lol (in a sad way.) :(

> I wonder if it is used as a pressure release valve for anonymity software developers. That way they focus their efforts on tor, which might be more amenable to USG exploits, than other anonymity networks.

But this is an interesting point, I've thought of it as well. It could be that this is happening semi-organically, in a kind of emergent manner. This sounds magic-boxy, but: just as the mind is not a uniform machine, a government structure is not uniform, either; both, however, appear to produce semi-coherent (to an extent) behaviour that makes sense. Sorry for this rambling sentence, but the "top-down vs bottom-up" conspiracy question is an interesting one, and I don't know of ways to communicate it in a rigorous way.

But, again, the pressure valve idea is an interesting one for sure.

[ippisl]

I only known of dingledine.

>> I believe both of them(Nick Mathewson and Roger Dingledine) have very high ethical standards and are great people;

This all issue of cryptography is ethically complex. One the one hand, too much state power can lead to bad things, definetly. On the other, strong crypto/anonymity can be a risky tool at the hands of terrorists. And in reality , terror can cause very bad stuff[1].

Say you are roger dingledine, and a very convincing NSA guy comes to you, and shows you the evidence that some terror act , that killed X people, has used anon-remailers. How would that make you feel ?

Except the guilt, one implication would be that USG would fight hard against mixminion.

And then he offers you to lead tor, with funding, and explains that this is a network that is hard to break ,so even if NSA can break it, it wouldn't do it for silly stuff , only for emergencies.

You don't need to be a bad person to accept. It's seems like a perfectly ethical thing to do.

Regarding bottom-up or top-down:

My guess is that NSA has a top-down strategy regarding cypherpunks.That's the way military forces work. And it would make sense for this tactic to be part of their strategy.

[1]WWI , The iraq war, and the cease of the israeli peace process were all at least partially caused by terrorists. And we still haven't seen WMD based terror.

[wfn]

> And then he offers you to lead tor, with funding, and explains that this is a network that is hard to break ,so even if NSA can break it, it wouldn't do it for silly stuff , only for emergencies.

> You don't need to be a bad person to accept. It's seems like a perfectly ethical thing to do.

Yeah, except transparency is at the core of Tor. So someone who was approached like that would make sure to communicate this exchange and what they had learnt in a public manner. If this were not possible (for whatever reasons), it wouldn't be an ethical choice to continue because it would endanger people; including people in repressive regimes, whose governments might also decide to track down 'bad guys' because it would be an emergency. (Those governments do buy sophisticated DPI hardware from Cisco et al. and use it.) etc. etc. Nobody would just take the word for it anyway - actual peer-reviewed research is required. If this is not possible, then it cannot be used as a guiding force. If it is, it must be transparently acknowledged.

> [1]WWI , The iraq war, and the cease of the israeli peace process were all at least partially caused by terrorists. And we still haven't seen WMD based terror.

I believe 'terrorist' has become a very semantically-loaded term with multiple connotative fields, so to speak. But I won't argue there, it's probably not the place anyway.

Edit:

> My guess is that NSA has a top-down strategy regarding cypherpunks.That's the way military forces work. And it would make sense for this tactic to be part of their strategy.

Yeah, but this would make sense

[ippisl]

Yes, the transparency does make sense. Maybe the NSA guy didn't tell him anything about the exploits of tor.

But the fact that it financed tor implies heavily that there are such exploits accessible to NSA. And the fact that it is known that tor is sensitive to global passive attackers is another. Even plain me can guess this.

Maybe the calculation favors tor, because if we assume you need to be a global passive attacker to exploit it, this favors large coalitions of many (currently democratic) nations collaborating over you're single repressive regime, and that seems like a reasonable compromise in thinking about a very hard ethical choice.

[kazagistar]

I would feel perfectly justified in knowing that had they not had the anonymizer, the individuals would have been murdered or shipped off to torture facilities without even a hint of due process. If the government's criminal process was actually transparent and just, then I might feel a bit of remorse for promoting anonymity tools, but in the current state, I have a large reason to suspect the motives of the hypothetical "NSA guy".