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Comment by nxzero | Hacker News Reader

By taking this course and referring others to it you're directly supporting CMU - and indirectly supporting CMU's activities related to breaking the Internet for the FBI/US:

https://www.google.com/search?q=CMU+TOR

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CMU SEI is more or less a separate institution that was founded with government money. Very little relation to the workings of the school, but it's still unfortunate that the work was done under the CMU name.

The SEI is located like a half-mile from the main part of the campus of the school (it's basically on the campus of University of Pittsburgh). Some of the professors in the CS department might work under SEI grants, but yeah, the SEI is basically an independent research organization that is heavily government-funded (like almost every research institution). They do a lot of non-evil things too, especially related to the challenges of building and maintaining extremely large applications (and the organizations that build and maintain them).

Fun fact; their building was used as a police station in The Dark Knight Returns.

It's unfair to think of CMU as an 'evil' entity just because of what some people in one particular and small department did.

There's a lot of really good work that comes out of CMU, including the department that helped the FBI.

EDIT: furthermore, SEI was doing independent research into the security of TOR. The FBI subpoena'd CMU to give up the results/contents of the research which is what ultimately helped the FBI do what they wanted.

If the department believed their research was important to the security of Tor, why did they not share it with Tor? Why did CMU do research in the wild on a live system and not get criminal complaint filed against them? What has CMU done to insure this does not happen again?

The department had every intention of sharing the information at, I believe, Blackhat. A lot of research (especially security related research) is funded and approved by the government. Before they were able to give the talk at Blackhat, the government stopped them from doing so. Since the provided funding was from the government, they had to comply to avoid legal issues.

This is a matter of legal debate about the intentions and methods of the government, IMO. To reiterate I don't think it's fair to blame students/faculty/researchers for not breaking the law and agreements that allowed them to conduct the research in the first place.

As for what CMU has done to insure that this does not happen again... I don't know.

I appreciate your commentary, but how is linking to a query with Google and all of its real-time tracking of users across all its real estate helping anybody? Why support them if not CMU?

https://duckduckgo.com/html/?q=CMU%20Tor

I linked to the HTML version for you, so it works without JS enabled. If you do this over Tor, that is the wise bet given your interest in reversing IP addresses through careless Tor usage pivotal to that investigation and others.

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