How We Work

> So long as Tor is used by people to feedback about human rights abuses, abuses of freedom of speech and expression in countries other than the U.S. and Western Europe, it is permissible. But as soon as people use Tor to criticize about human rights abuses in the U.S. and its allies, the NSA and GCHQ will track them.

First, I strongly agree that it is the duty of every citizen (of every nation) to criticize in the strongest terms such outrageous illegal activities of USIC as extra-judicial political assassination, torture, kidnapping, cyberintrusions into foreign telecom networks and employee health-care systems. Or profiling American children aged 3-7 yo for alleged "future terrorist propensity", i.e. creating a new Jim Crow of state-sponsored discrimination not unlike the institutionalized racism of South Carolina c. 1850.

Some analogies which I am sad to say appear to have considerable validity:

planter class: overseers: slaves
0.1 percent: USIC: 99.9 percent

Second, I agree that the published documents from the Snowden trove clearly show that NSA/GCHQ use their global surveillance apparatus to track down bloggers who express views they dislike.

As the author of one of the documents leaked by Snowden asked rhetorically: "what agency doesn't want to make the world a better place... for itself?" That pretty well captures the cynical amorality of the professional spook. Eliminating dissenting views is just one part of the evil they have wrought.

Third, I agree that thanks to Snowden it is no longer a plausible conjecture that NSA and GCHQ try hard to subvert Tor in order to do harm to Tor users. It is established fact, because these documents contain detailed information on their schemes. However, the documents clearly show that as of mid 2012, NSA and its sidekicks were not trying to directly insert malware into Tor itself, but were following the easier path of attacking components of the browser, experimenting with types of attacks anticipated by the Tor developers (such as Sybil attacks), abusing hard to avoid features of the "ecosystem" such as certain kinds of cookies, and taking advantage of user error.

See https://eff.org/nsa-spying/nsadocs for a compendium; look for the documents discussing attacks on Tor.

> One starts to wonder who among the Tor developers have been bought by the NSA and its allies

It is true that years ago Roger D worked as a summer intern at NSA. And one of the published documents is an NSA memo summarizing an invited talk he gave to his former employers, who apparently learned much less than they had hoped. The Snowden documents are themselves the best proof that Roger at least is not exactly a cats-paw of NSA! That is very good to know, with a good degree of assurance.

It is also true that the original developers of Tor were (and are) career employees at NRL (Naval Research Laboratories, part of the US Navy). In that sense, Tor was born inside the belly of the beast.

But we must all acknowledge that over the decades, the US Surveillance-Military-Industrial Complex has metastasized throughout American society like some deadly stage four cancer. Ties to the USIC are fairly common among US persons with programming skills. NSA is indeed the enemy of every citizen, everywhere in the world, but not everyone with ties to NSA is an enemy.

This said, I share the ongoing concern about the possibility (probability) that NSA will try to "shape" future directions of the Tor Project to suit its evil schemes, and I believe that the Project must accept that many will share it for quite some time to come.

I myself have tried to express concern about current ties of Rachel G, an US academic who does research on evading stylometry deanonymization attacks using stylometry, and who happens to be Roger's wife. She says her motives are pure and I have no reason to doubt that. My concern is that according to a profile of her work which appeared in a US military newspaper, DARPA views her work as supporting their efforts to deanonymize blog posts like this using stylometry. I provided a link and a quote but my post was censored. My point was and is not to criticize RG but to try to explain why IMO she has something to explain: how can she prevent her work from being exploited to harm people like us who need to express views which USIC might dislike?

Along the same lines, I and other users have urged the project to turn away funds from dubious sources such as SRI and DARPA.

> with huge amounts of money and promises of a life of luxury beyond imagination.

In general, they need promise far less than all that to "persuade" people to "assist" them, unfortunately.

> If I were a Tor developer or contributor, I would never resist such good offers. Why be hard on oneself when life is short?

Well, that's you. I feel there is still some reason to hope that Tor people would be far more resistant to threats/enticements from USIC.

I wish every Tor user personally knew some Tor developers. That's not possible, but Kate's suggestion that concerned users seek out videos of talks given by Tor developers is probably the next best thing.