Peeling the onion: Almost everyone involved in developing Tor was (or is) funded by the US governmen

[n2doc]

BY YASHA LEVINE

“The United States government can’t simply run an anonymity system for everybody and then use it themselves only. Because then every time a connection came from it people would say, “Oh, it’s another CIA agent.” If those are the only people using the network.”

—Roger Dingledine, co-founder of the Tor Network, 2004

***

In early July, hacker Jacob Appelbaum and two other security experts published a blockbuster story in conjunction with the German press. They had obtained leaked top secret NSA documents and source code showing that the surveillance agency had targeted and potentially penetrated the Tor Network, a widely used privacy tool considered to be the holy grail of online anonymity.

Internet privacy activists and organizations reacted to the news with shock. For the past decade, they had been promoting Tor as a scrappy but extremely effective grassroots technology that can protect journalists, dissidents and whistleblowers from powerful government forces that want to track their every move online. It was supposed to be the best tool out there. Tor’s been an integral part of EFF’s “Surveillance Self-Defense” privacy toolkit. Edward Snowden is apparently a big fan, and so is Glenn Greenwald, who says it “allows people to surf without governments or secret services being able to monitor them.”

But the German exposé showed Tor providing the opposite of anonymity: it singled out users for total NSA surveillance, potentially sucking up and recording everything they did online.

more

http://pando.com/2014/07/16/tor-spooks/

[Pholus]

1. I guess once information dominance was secured, Tor became a hinderance. nt

[1StrongBlackMan]

2. Wouldn't this mean ...

the NSA would have been able to access all of GG and snowden's electronic communications?

[klook]

3. Some of the comments on the article are pretty interesting.

If you encrypt your info end to end, supposedly you're much safer -- but many users don't take that extra step. And of course the U.S. govt. has placed limits on the strength of encryption we can get.

My technical knowledge of TOR and encryption is spotty. I would like to learn more. It doesn't seem to me that TOR is worthless just because the FBI and others have successfully snooped on some insufficiently encrypted traffic going over TOR nodes.

But still, for those truly needing secure communication channels, TOR alone may not be sufficient.