Yasha Levine: Interview about Tor, spies and the cult of crypto

>. Tor does not prevent Google from scanning your emails or recording your search history. Tor does not prevent Google from tracking your location via your Android phone, creating and saving a detailed day by day map of where you go and what you do. Tor works to an extent. If you an individual trying to hide from the NSA or the FBI or the FSB, Tor might give you some measure of protection — if you are very technically savvy — but it is a limited sort of protection. It does not protect users against corporate surveillance. But it does provide a false sense of privacy. That is why Silicon Valley companies like Google and Facebook support Tor: it sells a version of privacy — privacy from the government — that does threaten their own surveillance business models.

Most people that use TOR use either TBB (the TOR Browser Bundle) or Tails, or somethign similar. TOR is a core feature in the package but much more is needed to have some semblance of security.

Levine's argument is equivalent to saying SSL doesn't provide security, or door locks don't provide security, because they don't secure against every type of attack.

What a terrible article.

This is simply garbage. I used to enjoy some of his writing, back in the Exile days, but the moment he & Mark Ames went to work with Paul Carr / NSFWCorp / Pando everything went to shit.

They started pushing so much fiction and outright lies masquerading as journalism that I have permanently linked them & all associates to /dev/null.

Also, let us not forget that when the Snowden saga was breaking out, Paul Carr, Levine and the rest went into a frenzy where they attacked Assange and Snowden non-stop, trying to downplay the incident and also saying that it wasn't even something newsworthy. The biggest news story in _decades_ was staring them in the face, and these geniuses didn't have the intuition to see it.

I wish I'd kept the recordings of their online radio broadcasts, Paul Carr especially would run to find a rock to hide under.

Bleh^2.

>I don’t know why either. When I found out that the Chaos Computer Club in Hamburg is kind of the center of this global hacker-encryption culture, I was surprised.

>There is a strong undercurrent of right-wing movements in Germany, right?

This is a bullshit insinuation. The Chaos Computer Club was founded by leftists in Berlin and they have consistently criticized projects of the CDU, Germany's largest right wing party. They tend to be much more left wing libertarian than right wing libertarian and they are very far from being conservative in any way.

This is a bit like saying you can't trust AES because it was declassified by the NSA and offered to the public.

It works well enough within its limits. There is nothing that will protect you from active surveillance from a global actor and given enough time passive surveillance will de-anonymize you as well.

As for the part with government level actors using Tor, it's not surprising or new, why wouldn't they use it ? Just another tool.

And if you are using Tor to sign in to Google, then your threat vector is local and you are trying to increase security (privacy) in communicating with your trusted party (Google), not anonimity. Or that would be the logical assumption in using Tor this way.

I'd keep going, but the point is he seems to misunderstand what Tor can and can't do and even how to use it for any given scenario. As though the default usage in any scenario should offer complete anonimity against all possible forms of surveillance.

It kind of reminds me of "we need backdoors in crypto that only we can access" level of understanding.

This is among the most uninformed commentary regarding Tor that I have ever read. The author seems to understand nothing about the history of Tor, the usage of Tor, the technical design of Tor, Tor security research, encryption strategy, or the reception of Tor within the U.S. Government.

I can't even take umbrage with anything that's written here, because the author's basic factual axioms are simply wrong.

EDIT in Reply:

I started fact checking, and I couldn't past the first two paragraphs. It is a work of fiction that, if it occasionally flirts with the truth, does so almost certainly by chance.

Below is my rather unorganized beginning of a fact check:

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I would like to fact check the entirety, but I'm running short on time, so I'll skip his tin-foil hat pre-ramble:

>Tor became a prominent feature of political discourse around the world in 2013 when Edward Snowden popped up on the scene...

False. Tor rose to prominence far prior to leaks, particularly with the Arab Spring and the Silk Road. The first appearance on the front page of the NYT was in 2009 [0] A year prior to the leaks, Foreign Policy named Dingledine et al. to its Top 100 Global Thinkers list.[1] Snowden's sticker didn't start start that fire, although it might have added some fuel.

>I knew about some of the pit-falls and problems of Tor: I knew that if you signed into Google using Tor, it didn't really matter because Google still had all the information about your personal account. The same with Facebook. So Tor didn’t really solve the corporate side of surveillance.

>I knew about some of the pit-falls and problems of Tor: I knew that if you signed into Google using Tor, it didn't really matter because Google still had all the information about your personal account. The same with Facebook.

So Tor didn’t really solve the corporate side of surveillance.

So now, I have to ask. Has this guy just found a way to make a living getting stoned and spouting faux-anarchist nonsense?

Not signing into websites with your real name while on an anonymous service is the 1+1=2 of anonymity. So to remain anonymous, just... don't announce your name. That isn't a "pitfall." That's just common sense.

Around the point at which he was inventing grand conspiracies, particularly through close and perfect action of a monolithic government, I couldn't take it seriously any longer.

[0] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/23/world/middleeast/23censor....

[1]http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/11/26/the_fp_100_...

This isn't anything he hasn't been saying since his days with NSFWCorp, except the stuff about Applebaum.

According to Levine, everyone connected with the Tor project is no-good, either a scoundrel or a fool.

He also thinks that using Tor to protect your privacy is useless because the NSA has global reach. Apparently he is unfamiliar wit the concept of threat profile. If the CIA is after you, you are in trouble in many different ways. But for many thousands of other people, like whistle blowers, dissents in many countries, and any ordinary citizen who just doesn't want to be tracked by all the corporations online, Tor is great.

This article is like when you go for a beer with your contrarian mate and they cook up a bunch of insinuations based on half truths. Too much bullshit to be credible.

I'll paste a single quote for you to help anyone thinking of reading this drivel to make up their mind before reading. I personally enjoyed to see how some people will allow themselves to force a narrative if it only serves to help their political agenda. Here is a quote that explains why the author dislikes Tor:

> What is Tor really useful for? For media piracy, for child pornography, for drugs, intelligence, and deflecting from corporate surveillance.

And here is a quote telling you why he thinks this:

> At its core, the crypto culture is very right-wing. In America at least its tied to nationalism, to white power movements, to libertarianism: it is born out of a very conservative, right-wing view of the world, that sees the government and any of its attempts to meddle in the lives of the people as an evil force. And Silicon Valley is a pretty right-wing place. They have more liberal values towards gay marriage and things like that, but actually it is a very male-oriented, very white place; and very opposed to any kind of social programs that are run by the state, or any state attempts to regulate private property or enterprise. And these things overlap. The culture is very regressive, and maybe some of that exists in Germany, I don't know.

And the following (in reference to how corporate spying is worse then government spying):

> It’s a really useful PR tool that helps deflect peoples’ worries about privacy on the internet from the true problem, which is Silicon Valley, and redirects the conversation from corporate surveillance to government surveillance. Government surveillance is a problem, and it’s important that people talk about it, but it needs to be a broader conversation. You have to start at the corporate level and work up I think.

I think there are a few HUGE problems with this logic and I really hope the author/interviewee can answer these questions for me:

    1. Why is being right-wing inherently seen as bad or immoral?

On all of the political charts I'm usually far libertarian and far right. Does this mean I am immoral? Does this mean my opinions are less valid? This is a common tend today to call something a "right-wing" philosophy but I would never do that, in an attempt to shame the believers, for a left-wing philosophy.

For instance, one such left wing philosophy would be welfare. I can definitely see how welfare helps people, I definitely support some form of welfare in a society, and I'd keep supporting it given a different political climate in America. The idea that every human should have at least some basic standard of living (food, water, shelter, a bed) resonates strongly with me. What I don't necessarily support is the government, or any single corporation for that matter, handling it. Does that mean I'm evil? I don't think so but many people seem to feel this way now and it deeply troubles me. Some people think that disagreeing with a single portion of an idea really means you want to tear down the totality of structures built around the idea. That's definitely not the case.

I'd much rather instead of me giving money to the government, the government giving money to a charity organization, and then that charity organization giving it to the people I'd want a much more direct way of doing this transaction, preferably a way that is verifiable and with little overhead.

     2. Have you read anything from the crypto-anarchist movement?

I'm definitely not part of these people but I do think that their ideas still have some merit. I'd also like to say that these people are anything but "based in white power and nationalism". Anything but. If you've read any of the popular pieces [0] you will see they are extremely against any power structures. That is entirely the basis of their ideology. They want the benefits of a governed society without the ability for a government to medal. I'll let this person explain since I'm not qualified to answer this [1].

     3. What qualities do you think an anonymization network should have? Are the spy community and pedophiles using your software not a good benchmark of the success of your anonymization network?

They are both groups with very strict needs: they cannot be discovered, they must be able to transfer lots of data often, and they also must be able to do it from behind strict firewalls in some cases. These are both the exact use cases of someone from (Insert Dictatorship) who is afraid of someone hacking off one of their limbs because they said something long the lines of "I don't agree with (insert policy)".

If pedophiles and spies aren't using your free-speech platform to communicate then it's not safe enough for them, and it's definitely not safe enough for someone behind "enemy" lines in a dictatorship with not access to news/unfiltered opinions.

[0] - http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/student-papers... [1] - https://www.reddit.com/r/Anarchy101/comments/1uioxz/what_is_...

BS.

I thought this part was a very interesting perspective.

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I read a little about the origins of Cypherpunk ideology in the 80s and 90s, and what struck me was how they talked about encryption technology the same way that right-wing libertarians talk about guns: as an instrument that could defend them against government tyranny, and everyone could have it, and once everyone had it, they would all be safe from tyranny.

Absolutely. The ideas that surround Tor are the same ideas that float around NRA speeches: guns are liberty. If everyone has a gun, there will be no bad guys, there will be no crime, no government tyranny, because everyone will be equally powerful. It’s a libertarian utopia, it’s about equalizing power, but it ignores the deeper social, and economic, and political issues of power in society.

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It would be great if those same people focused on surveillance, encryption, and the Fourth Amendment, which I think are the true threat to and protections for everyone's liberty; and not on armed government suppression, firearms and the Second Amendment, which IMHO are extremely unlikely threats, and promote violence and are anti-democratic (those with guns and not votes make decisions, because when outvoted those with guns can ignore the votes of their fellow citizens).