PandoDaily has been posting a series of editorials and investigative reports about government ties to the Tor project which has led to some hot words exchanged by members of the Tor project and journalists at PandoDaily.
Now, PandoDaily reports a threatening tweet from Anonymous (since deleted). Is this a case of a journalist trying to bring attention to himself, or has the author struck a nerve?
Brief history of Tor (from Almost everyone involved in developing Tor was (or is) funded by the US government)
The origins of Tor go back to 1995, when military scientists at the Naval Research Laboratory began developing cloaking technology that would prevent someone’s activity on the Internet from being traced back to them. They called it “onion routing” — a method redirecting traffic into a parallel peer-to-peer network and bouncing it around randomly before sending it off to its final destination. The idea was to move it around so as to confuse and disconnect its origin and destination, and make it impossible for someone to observe who you are or where you’re going on the Internet.
Onion routing was like a hustler playing the three-card monte with your traffic: the guy trying to spy on you could watch it going under one card, but he never knew where it would come out.
The technology was funded by the Office of Naval Research and DARPA. Early development was spearheaded by Paul Syverson, Michael Reed and David Goldschlag — all military mathematicians and computer systems researchers working for the Naval Research Laboratory, sitting inside the massive Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling military base in Southeast Washington, D.C.
The original goal of onion routing wasn’t to protect privacy — or at least not in the way most people think of “privacy.” The goal was to allow intelligence and military personnel to work online undercover without fear of being unmasked by someone monitoring their Internet activity.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Jeremiah Cornelius on Friday December 12 2014, @11:15PM
No big secret. This was outed by Cryptome.org [cryptome.org] many years ago. If you don't want to be a Useful Idiot [wikipedia.org], then you should be able to absorb the real history and purposes of the tool - including the role for destabilizing opponents for US Corporate and Financial Hegemony.
You see, the NGO's like "National Endowment for Democracy" are NOT feel-good champions of Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. They are neo-lib Imperial schemes with plausible deniability. Keeping the mission fuzzy - by sending Government and think-tank dollars to EFF is a good way to use the good intentions of a generally "liberal" middle class to rally support.
The result is "color revolution" bullshit and fake revolutionary destabilization propaganda like "Femen". In reality, the game is the same as when Mossadegh was toppled [wikipedia.org] in '53.
You're betting on the pantomime horse...
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 12 2014, @11:16PM
Thanks for pointing out Cryptome was on this forever ago. They are the original wikileaks, really.
(Score: 2) by pnkwarhall on Friday December 12 2014, @11:51PM
Thank you for the link about Mossadegh, who was previously unknown to me.
Lift Yr Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven
(Score: 2) by Jeremiah Cornelius on Saturday December 13 2014, @12:06AM
Very interesting history. This was Kermit Roosevelt and the fledgling CIA's first outing in the "real world" - effecting regime change. A year later - flush with success and reputation, they went on to Guatemala, etc.
You can't understand the historical relation of Iran to the US without this information. Every Iranian, right or left - religious or secular, all know this well. The revolution in '79 was fueled by this sense that the national destiny of the people was stolen from them by a trick.
It's worth seeing Anthony Bourdain's Iran show... http://www.cnn.com/video/shows/anthony-bourdain-parts-unknown/season-4/iran/index.html [cnn.com]
Amazing the great, personal goodwill Iranians have for America, even with this background - let's hardly mention Vincennes downing Flight 655. [wikipedia.org]
You're betting on the pantomime horse...
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 13 2014, @12:11AM
I hate feminism.
Global feminism is even worse.
Marry young girls.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Jeremiah Cornelius on Saturday December 13 2014, @12:55AM
Femen is not feminism. This is not "feminist" action, it is not "progressive". It does not further the cause of human equality with regard to gender or any other factor:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFcqZ8X2H_s [youtube.com]
"The source of the funding for the organization, which has been reported to be paying double to triple the average wage in the Ukraine, which has been confirmed by subsequent research. The second is the battles that it has been picking or more precisely which group and country it has notably left out of its burlesque-style protests: Judaism and Israel...there was a rather belated announcement in December 2013 of a Femen chapter in Israel...(but)There is none of the trademark Femen violence against religious symbols: no burning Torah scrolls, throwing copies of the Babylonian Talmud into pig pens, no running naked through Hasidic neighbourhoods and so forth... From what is known about their funding: the key player appears to be an individual named Jed Sunden. [linkedin.com] Sunden is a Brooklyn-born American Jew who founded a major Ukrainian newspaper/media company; KP Media (which owned the Kyiv Post till 2008/2009 for example), and also is an active part of the Ukrainian jewish community. Sunden was the man who 'discovered' Femen and it was he who began to give them the oxygen of publicity (and notoriety) for their topless protesting in the Kyiv Post".
http://www.kyivpost.com/content/ukraine/richest-expats-jed-sunden-85484.html [kyivpost.com]
You're betting on the pantomime horse...
(Score: 2) by cyrano on Saturday December 13 2014, @12:17AM
True.
Happened before too. In the early days of the net a Canadian company called Zeroknowledge sytems developed the first real onion system that I'm aware of. It was called "Freedom". Their product was bought out by unknown parties. Probably CIA. I seem to remember they got 20 million dollars to end the product.
Despite having source code even before 2000, it took the CIA an awful long time to repackage this into tor.
I researched an exit node in the USA years ago, finding that the person running it was also probably a CIA software contractor. That node is still up.
Anyone else here who was a Freedom beta tester?
The quieter you become, the more you are able to hear. - Kali [kali.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 12 2014, @11:22PM
https://blog.torproject.org/blog/solidarity-against-online-harassment [torproject.org]
https://storify.com/ShrillBrigade/geronimo [storify.com]
https://storify.com/endomorphosis/government-passes-sopa-amendment [storify.com]
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 12 2014, @11:25PM
(1) I stopped reading Pando because they had a really warped view of Snowden's disclosures, it came across as trollish or at best deliberately obtuse. The kind of writing I'm used to seeing from internet message board randos more interested in pushing their own narrative than in explaining the facts.
(2) They are totally right about Tor's ongoing government funding - both directly to the project and indirectly as money that goes to major Tor contributors and proponents in the form of consulting dollars, and I think it is something that needs to be made much more explicit than it has been. Everybody should read the articles they've done on that, it is disheartening at best because it is one of those things where all the factors necessary for corruption to flourish are present. Last I read there was no evidence of corruption but the way things are there are practically no barriers in place to prevent it and human nature is as human nature does...
(3) I think Pando's also been exaggerating the pushback to make that into a story too - they've been complaining about it for months now. Complaining about Anonymous threatening them seems like sensationalism since Anonymous is all over the place and teh lulz is at least as important to them as any other motive.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 12 2014, @11:48PM
(1) I stopped reading Pando because they had a really warped view of Snowden's disclosures, it came across as trollish or at best deliberately obtuse. The kind of writing I'm used to seeing from internet message board randos more interested in pushing their own narrative than in explaining the facts.
Which was that he was a traitor? That does seem trollish and obtuse to me.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 13 2014, @03:46PM
The problem the NSA and CIA have is they have conflicting goals.
One is to scoop up as much intel as they can. The second is to protect the information we generate.
To do one you need the other. Unfortunately they have fallen in love with scooping but do not want to fix the infrastructure anymore. Even though it would benefit themselves. They are so in love with 'its a secret' they do not stop and realize that they are hurting themselves in the long term for a very short term gain.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 13 2014, @06:06PM
None of these reactions argues against you,
1. General
Modern Democracy 101.
A table.
People seated at the table. Some could be elected.
All sorts of people but none all too bright, all sorts of opposing viewpoints except you own them all whether they know it or not.
Corruption does not need direct kickbacks or favors, it is more than enough to belong to the right crowd. Buying general influence and more so when there is none to be had is corruption even if one does not cash in on the feel-good factor. Even if there is no way to cash in. Not cashing in gives you added interest, it multiplies the feel-good factor and that might be all you need and want. You do not need to point it out, it works by itself and you become a known good guy.
Here is how to make a working conspiracy, do not tell people what the results of their actions will amount to when combined with the actions of other people they are unaware of. There is no reason for overt conspiracy if you can have person A do A because of reason A and person B do B because of reason B and so on until you get the result you want.
2. Nonions
So I have software which does privacy. Easy to imagine the uses and public support. But I have first mover advantage and make the rules (all software is) and I have resources elsewhere to bootstrap the network and maintain dominance in many ways.
Instead of full network analysis for the entire Internet do it for a smaller network with a higher amount of positives. I just want the addresses to break machines and sidestep encryption. The insane hunt apples, normal people get a ladder, smart people plant a seed.
I care less about my ISP snooping, they would bore quickly, than 5 Eyes indexing and archiving everything. Maybe the EFF should not recommend Tor.
3. Iconography
We might (does not matters) agree that it does not matter if Snowden is a traitor or anything else, that what matters is the content of the documents and files. Reading and understanding is not attainable for most. Advice random and bad. Then?
Got to remember no one is infallible. Snowden makes assumptions that are not practical. Snowden has survivor bias. Snowden surfed on time delay and lack of suspicion, two things that are one and the same. With luck it works on the run.
AC because right now I am angry (not at you, maybe at me) and too aware that I am forever tired. I do not usually write like this.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday December 12 2014, @11:36PM
(Score: 3, Informative) by frojack on Friday December 12 2014, @11:56PM
Well, its all open source [torproject.org], and its claimed to be the second-generation onion routing, so that implies that everything of the original has been replaced or deep-inspected.
People have claimed to be able to end-to-end trace, but as Tor explained [torproject.org] a long time ago, preventing that was not even the main focus of the project. If some three letter agency can monitor both ends of a tor session its fairly easy to pinpoint the end users. (That may be changing).
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 13 2014, @01:18AM
> so that implies that everything of the original has been replaced or deep-inspected.
The question is inspected by whom? The people taking money from the government?
(Score: 2) by frojack on Saturday December 13 2014, @02:06AM
I was referring to the software being inspected.
I posted a link to the repository.
Its open source.
Inspect it yourself.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 13 2014, @01:29AM
implies that everything of the original has been ... deep-inspected
everyone assumed the same about openssl before heartbleed
assumption is the mother of all fuck ups
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Saturday December 13 2014, @08:14PM
Have you ever even LOOKED at code? It's quite easy to inspect code where you think you know what it's trying to do and miss several corner cases. That's why so much effort goes into test cases.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by frojack on Friday December 12 2014, @11:44PM
I've mentioned this fact is more than one place and been modded troll for my efforts. It seems that the TOR aficionados find TORs history inconvenient. Yet there can be no question where it was designed.
Until it became popular, the vast majority of the exit nodes were hosted in a Virginia Colo location right around corner from the CIA. When the impetus was to keep exit nodes out of reach of the Chinese and other repressive regimes this made perfect (although naive) sense.
Now days the exit nodes are everywhere [hackertarget.com], with only a tiny minority in the US since it has become clear that the US was the last place you could trust to keep hands off the nodes.
Why should anyone attack history, inconvenient as it may be?
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by pnkwarhall on Friday December 12 2014, @11:56PM
Now days the exit nodes are everywhere
And so few? I did not expect this "handful".
Lift Yr Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven
(Score: 2) by frojack on Saturday December 13 2014, @12:03AM
And so few? I did not expect this "handful".
The map is zoom-able, and the dots have node count numbers. Also that site doesn't claim to have mapped them all.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by pnkwarhall on Saturday December 13 2014, @12:22AM
Whether or not the site got them all, if the map represents the majority of nodes, this means that setting-up and running **an** exit node is a significant contribution to the project.
Lift Yr Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Saturday December 13 2014, @01:16AM
Think about it. Everybody talks a good game but what non-maniac is actually going to light up an exit node?
The vast majority of the traffic that would come out is the most toxic sludge imaginable. Silk Road is one of the more reputable destinations. The only thing that slows the flow of kiddie porn is that now most of that traffic moves from one tor user to another and never exits into the trackable Internet. But enough other vile/illegal/tos violating traffic will be tracked back to your IP that unless you are a top tier connected site you should not host an exit node.
The only way that reality changes is if a lot of normal traffic were to route over it to mask the toxic stuff with volume. But since tor is going to be a lot slower than https, which is enough privacy for 99% of people who even care about it, why would most non-criminal users even want to use tor? Most new tech is initially used for porn and other shady activity, but other users typically flow in. See videotape and the Internet for examples. But who is going to be the first 'anchor tenant' on tor space? The Amazon or Yahoo! of tor? Why would they? Tor doesn't enable any new modes of communication, it only provides an enhanced illusion of privacy. But most people already think they are anonymous on the Internet and thus will not see the value proposition in tor. And then people like myself saw from the first that tor was only an illusion.
(Score: 2) by pnkwarhall on Saturday December 13 2014, @01:58AM
The vast majority of the traffic that would come out is the most toxic sludge imaginable.
Yup -- **I** would never run an exit node, for exactly those reasons (other than bandwidth costs), at this point in my life.
Lift Yr Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven
(Score: 2) by frojack on Saturday December 13 2014, @02:04AM
The vast majority of the traffic that would come out is the most toxic sludge imaginable.
Well, usually most of the stuff that comes "out" of an exit node consists of page requests from some remote user.
The putrid stuff you refer to, ENTERS via the exit node, (In a perversity of naming).
Tor obfuscates connections. Not the traffic entering or exiting tor.
However, tor can can also handle secure traffic.
The traffic between you and the TOR exit node and the destination website and back SHOULD use HTTPS.
EEF has an interactive demo page [eff.org] about this).
Tor Project recommends people run a relay [torproject.org].
Tor project doesn't recommend setting up an exit node [eff.org] without your upstream knowing.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 13 2014, @12:08AM
In the beginning, computers were designed to crack crypto, help nuclear arms research, and figure out how to lob shells better, but most of all to crack crypto.
Then the military in conjunction with academia, which has always been close to the military, began developing a network of computers that could survive a nuclear strike. Thus was born the internet.
TOR began as a military (Navy, if I remember the history right) project for hiding spies, and the State Department moved to make it available for foreign dissident movements to use against authoritarian regimes.
The history of the information age is inconvenient for anyone who wants to live in a fantasy world of peace on earth and goodwill towards men. History generally is inconvenient in that way. The problem isn't the history, and it's not the tools: it's the fantasy that the military is somehow separable from the rest of society, that it is an evil to be forgotten and denied, and that it contributes nothing but eats up resources and feeds testosterone-junkies. The truth is that there has always been some military, some force of arms, for good or for evil, and that our society has been shaped by this historical reality. You can't escape that, no matter how hard you wish.
You can, however, accept it. That doesn't mean embracing it: you can still try to change the world and make the future different from the past, but you can't deny the past.
Knowing that TOR was designed by the USG tells you that the NSA probably has a much better idea than you of its weaknesses and any mathematical flaws behind it -- like how many exit nodes need to be under control in order to identify senders through statistical efforts. That doesn't mean that it's necessarily broken, or that dissidents should reject it, or that using it means you're a shill for the State Department and your movement is a crowd of useful idiots working to advance American hegemony. It's still a tool, like the internet is, and it comes with no worse ideological or security implications than using the internet in general does. The same people came up with both of them, after all.
If it really bothers you, don't order your next high off the latest incarnation of Silk Road, and use your time and energy to run for office instead. It's legal and will do more to change the world than a parcel of synthetic bliss.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 13 2014, @12:16AM
"and use your time and energy to run for office instead. It's legal and will do more to change the world than a parcel of synthetic bliss."
Won't legalize marrying female children. Women would have to lose the vote and all "soft" power for that to come back.