| Don't take this the wrong way, but... this is hardly news. From top of the Tor Project's "Who uses Tor?" page: "Tor was originally designed, implemented, and deployed as a third-generation onion routing project of the Naval Research Laboratory.[0] It was originally developed with the U.S. Navy in mind, for the primary purpose of protecting government communications." [1] The article you link to quotes one of the original TOR authors, but fails to link to his words. They're here. [2] Even if Tor hadn't originally been built by the NRO, spooks would still be using it for their "open source" intelligence gathering: it is effective, well-built software that protects against the threats that it claims to protect against. That Pando Daily article attempts to claim that the fact that NSA captures Tor traffic makes Tor a danger. The leaked NSA slides from which that fact comes from also reveal that NSA captures and stores (for a long time) all encrypted traffic that they cannot decrypt. [3] This means that connecting to a non-USian site using SSL/TLS makes you just as much a target as Tor usage. :) I get that people freak out about government funding of this project or that project, but there are a few things to keep in mind here: 1) Tor is open source and is developed in the open. [4] 2) Respected cypherpunks and cryptographers have periodically evaluated the project and declared it to be effective and high quality. 3) A weakening of Tor or the Tor Network reduces its value for intelligence gathering and covert law enforcement operations. I welcome your questions and/or comments. :) [0] That phrase links to http://www.onion-router.net/ [1] https://www.torproject.org/about/torusers.html.en [2] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-talk/2011-March/0... (Notice that this is an official Tor Project mailing list archive, and that the message is still visible. :) ) Extended discussion is available here: http://www.cryptome.org/0003/tor-spy.htm [3] Other NSA slides reveal that the NSA can't actually break Tor. They have to rely on endpoint compromise or improper configuration of hidden services to unmask Tor users. [4] https://gitweb.torproject.org/tor.git/ |