Tor Project 2008 Tax Return Now Online

[Anon Mus]

Roger Dingledine wrote:
> On Sat, Aug 14, 2010 at 12:26:57PM +0100, Anon Mus wrote:
>   
>> It looks like 90% of the funding is from the US, nearly all US government.
>>     
>
> If you know any funders outside the US who care about privacy, anonymity,
> or circumvention, we're all ears. :)
>
>   
I am certain there are funders outside the US but  whilst Tor remains a 
tool the US I would guess they'd be reticent to contribute and who could 
blame them.

>> Add to this the number of Tor nodes run from US institutions (many at US  
>> gov funded edu's) and  you should be able to see who that "Global  
>> Adversary" is!
>>
>> ****  US - GOV ****
>>     
>
> Conspiracy theories aside, this is an important open research question
> that still needs more research attention: if you can watch a given amount
> of Internet backbone traffic, how much of the Tor network can you surveil?
>
> Here are three papers to get you started if you want to learn more about
> this issue:
> http://freehaven.net/anonbib/#feamster:wpes2004
> http://freehaven.net/anonbib/#DBLP:conf/ccs/EdmanS09
> http://freehaven.net/anonbib/#murdoch-pet2007
>
> Designs like Tor have always accepted that they will be vulnerable to
> a global passive adversary:
> https://svn.torproject.org/svn/projects/design-paper/tor-design.html#subsec:threat-model
>
>   
I think you'll find that Tor only became officially incapable of 
protecting from such an adversary around 2004/5 when numerous request to 
add this protection to Tor was made. Since then  its been the official 
policy not to protect from such a threat (so as to head off any 
complaints it does not do the job perhaps ??).

It a good idea that you speak for Tor only, not other system here, where 
there are/have been genuine attempts to provide full anonymity, no get 
out clause.

> >The key point to realize here is that you shouldn't so much think about
> the locations of the Tor relays, but instead think about which networks
> the communication between Tor users and the Tor network traverses,
> and which networks the communication between the Tor network and the
> destination services (e.g. websites) traverses. The Internet itself has
> bottlenecks that make our task hard even if we could engineer a good
> diversity of relay locations.
>
>   

Conspiracy theorist slander aside, FACT:  in the mid-1990's IBM had 80% 
of the Global Internet Traffic flowiing through their servers, paid for 
by US military contracts, all routed through the US, so the US -GOV 
could spy on the global internet traffic.


> >We can certainly imagine that some pieces of the US government have the
> capability to tap large pieces of the Internet:
> https://www.eff.org/nsa/faq
>
> But what saves us here is that the US government, like all governments,
> is not one person. It's a lot of different groups, all with different
> goals and different capabilities.

That saves you??

Are you saying its not co-ordinated?  Did you once work for US - Gov - 
Mil  research?

> >So a) that means some parts of the
> government actually want to support freedom of speech and/or need for
> themselves the security properties that Tor provides, and b) there's a
> huge amount of bureaucracy to slow down coordination between different
> pieces of the government -- so even if somebody at NSA can beat Tor,
> that doesn't mean somebody at FBI can call him up and ask for answers.
>
> --Roger
>
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>   
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