[tor-talk] Tor and Financial Transparency

[Roger Dingledine]

On Fri, Aug 30, 2013 at 08:41:13AM -0400, Ted Smith wrote:
> Until you can find a better funding source in the US than the DoD,
> that's a reality we'll all have to live with.
> 
> You should try calling your congressperson and asking them to support
> legislation to defund the military-industrial complex and fund the NSF,
> which is the other main source of grants in computer science.

Oh hey, funny you should mention that. We have an NSF grant, joint with
Georgia Tech and Princeton, to work on measuring censorship, evaluating
censorship circumvention approaches, and general work in the Internet
censorship area:
http://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1111539
It's $750k split over 4 years, so it's not as much as the darpa grant,
but hopefully will still help diversify a little bit (I say a little bit
because it's still US government funding, just from a different piece).

And if all goes well we'll soon be a subcontractor for Nick Hopper's
research lab at University of Minnesota, to help him work on
privacy-preserving ways to measure Tor user and user behavior. These
measurements will especially help researchers who do performance,
scalability, and anonymity analysis on Tor to have a more accurate
model of user behavior -- which would have been especially useful in
e.g. "Methodically Modeling the Tor Network":
http://freehaven.net/anonbib/#cset12-modeling

In the past, you could have read about these two grants in
https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-talk/2012-December/026891.html
aka
https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-reports/2012-December/000104.html

--Roger