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This is brought up sometimes as some clever gotcha but Tor gets funding from many sources, and DARPA and the other US agencies that give money to Tor (like OTF)

This is brought up sometimes as some clever gotcha but Tor gets funding from many sources, and DARPA and the other US agencies that give money to Tor (like OTF) give on the order of 10s of thousands of US dollars per year. OTF (Open Technology Fund) — recently severely diminished — was funding tons of anti-censorship efforts like this with small grants to help get American propaganda into Iran, China, etc. Helping spread the message of the US Government is apparently a more valuable goal than surveillance of western citizens.

pphysch 4y ago
Their tax documents unambiguously state that the US government is their primary funder. At any rate, the USG has enormous leverage over the governance of Tor and that should worry anyone that pretends to care about their online privacy re: Tor. Mullvad putting out PR about funding TP as a peer of the USG doesn't make TP look good, it makes Mullvad look seedy.
- godelski 4y ago
  > Their tax documents unambiguously state that the US government is their primary funder. No one is objecting to this fact. We're all objecting to your conclusion that because the US Gov gives Tor money that it is not secure and/or has a nefarious purpose. This is quite literally the same logic people use to justify the anti-vaccination movement and many other dangerous conspiracies. You don't have to trust the US Gov (what American does?), but you need more than association to prove something nefarious.
godelski 4y ago
I think people miss that the US government (as basically all governments) is not a singular entity with absolutely aligned objectives. Or even how tools don't have universal purposes. It's far from inconceivable that the US government wants to use use Tor to hide spies (CIA) as well as use Tor to help people communicate against their own governments (Department of Democracy). This isn't even opposing objectives, which we also see in any large entity (see encryption in general). Painting the US government with a broad brush as "absolute evil" is just as bad as painting it with a broad brush of "savior of the world." Neither allows us to actually improve our government because in the former you can't encourage good actions and the latter doesn't allow you to discourage bad actions. If everything is bad then there are no degrees of bad. If everything is good there's no degrees of good. If Democracy is an optimization problem (it is) then this is like trying to find the optima by going in a constant direction with a constant step size. I thought it was rather obvious that "shit is complicated and requires nuance" but I'm often impressed how common it is to pretend things are simple and obvious.

pphysch 4y ago

Their tax documents unambiguously state that the US government is their primary funder. At any rate, the USG has enormous leverage over the governance of Tor and that should worry anyone that pretends to care about their online privacy re: Tor. Mullvad putting out PR about funding TP as a peer of the USG doesn't make TP look good, it makes Mullvad look seedy.

godelski 4y ago
> Their tax documents unambiguously state that the US government is their primary funder. No one is objecting to this fact. We're all objecting to your conclusion that because the US Gov gives Tor money that it is not secure and/or has a nefarious purpose. This is quite literally the same logic people use to justify the anti-vaccination movement and many other dangerous conspiracies. You don't have to trust the US Gov (what American does?), but you need more than association to prove something nefarious.

godelski 4y ago

I think people miss that the US government (as basically all governments) is not a singular entity with absolutely aligned objectives. Or even how tools don't have universal purposes. It's far from inconceivable that the US government wants to use use Tor to hide spies (CIA) as well as use Tor to help people communicate against their own governments (Department of Democracy). This isn't even opposing objectives, which we also see in any large entity (see encryption in general). Painting the US government with a broad brush as "absolute evil" is just as bad as painting it with a broad brush of "savior of the world." Neither allows us to actually improve our government because in the former you can't encourage good actions and the latter doesn't allow you to discourage bad actions. If everything is bad then there are no degrees of bad. If everything is good there's no degrees of good. If Democracy is an optimization problem (it is) then this is like trying to find the optima by going in a constant direction with a constant step size. I thought it was rather obvious that "shit is complicated and requires nuance" but I'm often impressed how common it is to pretend things are simple and obvious.