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Comment by xster | Hacker News Reader

This seems like a good place to say that I strongly recommend Yasha Levine's Surveillance Valley book (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34220713-surveillance-va...) where he suggests that all of this is working as intended, going all the way back to the military counter-insurgency roots of the arpanet first in places like Vietnam, and then back home in anti-war and leftist movements. The contemporary themes that are relevant are the fact that current privacy movements like Tor, Signal, OTF, BBG are fundamentally military funded and survive on government contracts. It distracts from the needed political discourse into a technology one where "encryption is the great equalizer" and everyone can resist big brother in their own way on the platforms the government has built. Encryption does exist, but it also distracts from other vectors like vulnerabilities (that led to Ulbricht getting caught), what services you would e2e connect to, how you get the clients to connect to those services, what store can push binaries for said clients etc.

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Yasha Levine is a conspiracy theorist hack. There’s really no other way to say it. His narrative is attractive to a left leaning audience with shallow knowledge in this area, but the reality is that without publicly funded software like Tor, Signal, OTF, and my own Lantern, our world would be more fully saturated with corporate control of the internet. We need more public funding for open source software (with public security audits, mind you), not less. Without them, we’d basically be left with Wikipedia as the only popular entity on the internet outside of corporate control.

All of these projects are more properly grouped with government funding in other spheres, such as the BBC or PBS in media, than they are with the surveillance state or the NSA. Levine overlooks basic details, such as reproducible builds, that quickly collapse the house of cards that is his narrative. He tries to paint them all with the NSA brush, when, in fact, they’re simply projects that have historically received some of their funding from the government while fulfilling missions with extraordinary humanitarian benefits. Levine’s own knowledge and experience in this area is shallow. Look elsewhere.

I don't disagree with what you're saying. I'm not sure your statement is in disagreement with mine either? I don't think he's saying less OSS is better or anything dogmatic? All he's saying is that using Tor/Signal shouldn't be the end all be all of your surveillance concerns.

> would be more fully saturated with corporate control of the internet

You might disagree. His point was that the "corporate controllers of the internet" support projects like Tor because A) it gives a (somewhat ineffective) channel for people to focus on rather than political recourses and B) there's no real threat to the corporate model. What would you do in this e2e encrypted internet without corporate services?

> such as reproducible builds

Seems like a tangential point. You can have an untampered copy of a client with a vulnerability.

> funding from the government while fulfilling missions with extraordinary humanitarian benefits

I don't think this is in disagreement with anything either

This comment is an incredibly naive attempt at a smear.

> Without them, we’d basically be left with Wikipedia as the only popular entity on the internet outside of corporate control.

Wikipedia is absolutely not "outside of corporate control". It is trivially astroturfed to advance special interests.

> All of these projects are more properly grouped with government funding in other spheres, such as the BBC or PBS in media

Both BBC and PBS routinely publish outright disinformation to advance the special interests of their corporate/government clients, including the intelligence community. For example, look at PBS Frontline's ridiculous puff piece for the violent extremist group HTS last year.

> Levine overlooks basic details, such as reproducible builds

Reproducible builds are also easily circumvented by selectively deploying backdoors and other malware, based on IP or other fingerprints.

If there are good reasons to dispute Levine's investigative journalism, they're not here.

Um, ok. All of the above projects use not only reproducible builds for many platforms, but they’re all open source, and they all have public security audits. Those three pillars are about as good as it gets. Is there something you would add?

I’m not claiming PBS and the BBC are perfect entities, but they do offer an alternative source of information that runs against the grain of corporate media. You would prefer…what exactly?

> Is there something you would add?

Let's start with "not being created/funded by the State Department or Pentagon".

> You would prefer…what exactly?

Again, let's start with "not being blatant propaganda produced by warmongers".

First, there’s a vast difference between the state department and the pentagon. Lumping those two together just reflects an unsophisticated understanding of the federal government. Signal has never received any state department or pentagon money. Tor had a significant early contribution from a researcher at Naval Research. That’s the extent of any pentagon funding. They have received significant state department funding, but to call the state department “warmongers” is just not accurate.

Please stop spreading misinformation. From the Tor Project's public IRS documents:

> WHILE FUNDING FOR TOR ORIGINALLY FOCUSED ON BASIC RESEARCH TO BETTER UNDERSTAND ANONYMITY, PRIVACY, AND CENSORSHIP-RESISTANCE, THE MAJORITY OF FUNDING NOW FALLS INTO THREE CATERGORIES: DEVELOPMENT FUNDING FROM GROUPS LIKE RADIO FREE ASIA AND DARPA TO DESIGN AND BUILD PR OTOTYPES BASED ON RESEARCH DONE BOTH INSIDE TOR AND ALSO AT OTHER INSTITUTIONS; DEPLOYMENT FUNDING FROM ORGANIZATIONS LIKE THE US STATE DEPARTMENT AND SWEDEN'S FOREIGN MINISTRY; AND UNRESTRICTED CONTRIBUTIONS FROM PRIVATE FOUNDATIONS, CORPORATIONS, AND INDIVIDUAL DONORS FOLLOWING IS A BREAKDOWN OF THE TOR PROJECT'S FUNDING SOURCES FOR THE PERIOD ENDED JUNE 30, 2020: FUNDING FROM US GOVERNMENT SOURCES US STATE DEPT - BUREAU OF DEMOCRACY, HUMAN RI GHTS AND LABOR 752,154 GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY - NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION 98,727 RADIO FR EE ASIA/OPEN TECHNOLOGY FUND 908,744 NEW YORK UNIVERSITY - INSTITUTE OF MUSEUM AND LIBRARY SERVICES 101,549 GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY - DEFENSE ADVANCED RESEARCH PROJECTS AGENCY 392,00 8 FUNDING FROM NON-US GOVERNMENT SOURCES DIGITAL IMPACT ALLIANCE - UNITED NATIONS 25,000 S WEDISH INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT COOPERATION AGENCY (SIDA) 284,697 FUNDING FROM CORPORATE SOURCES MOZILLA 157,500 AVAST 50,000 MULLVAD 50,000 FUNDING FROM PRIVATE FOUNDATIONS OPEN SOURCE COLLECTIVE 23,100 MEDIA DEMOCRACY FUND 270,000 ZCASH FOUNDATION 51,122 MOZILLA OPEN SOURCE SUPPORT MOSS 75,000 RIPE 53,114 CRAIG NEWMARK PHILANTHROPIC FUND 50,000 STEFAN THO MAS CHARITABLE FOUNDATION 50,000 KAO FOUNDATION 10,000 MARIN COMMUNITY FOUNDATION 1,000 IN DIVIDUAL DONATIONS 890,353

Yes they’ve received funding from DARPA. I realized I forgot that after I posted. Good catch. To my knowledge, that funding is for new anti-censorship transports to sneak traffic in and out of censored countries.

And the State Department are definitely warmongers.

SecState Kissinger orchestrated the incineration of Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam.

SecState Powell orchestrated the flattening of Iraq.

SecState Clinton orchestrated the butchering of Libya.

SecState Pompeo tried and failed to orchestrate the annihilation of Iran by assassinating top officials and drawing them into war.

And so on and so forth. These aren't even theories. The State Department is closely involved in destabilizing sovereign governments through the full spectrum of means, including war, to advance Washington's interests.

> from the government while fulfilling missions with extraordinary humanitarian benefits

Ahh yes, the famed operation Condor, operation Gladio, operation iceberg and so many other famed "humanitarian" projects

At the end of the day all that you mentioned goes back to a post-facto "it is good because *we* do it", I would go to say that most people here in HN are well aware of the start of Google when it was funded by us Intel as a way to parse Vietnam era datasets, or how US Intel uses Radio Free Asia to destabilize enemy countries abroad, but again, it is only good/not bad when "*we"* do it

Apologies for a rather low quality comment, but these types of persons handwaving the actual structure behind all of this really get on my nerves, specially when I have had family members be tortured as a consequence of these US activities

I’m certainly not defending all US government actions. That’s exactly the point. Levine tries to lump all of this in with surveillance. The US government funds the NSA, that is true. It also funds food stamps. And torture. The trick is to untangle it.

> The trick is to untangle it.

USAID is specifically designed and called that so as to tangle it, tell me, how would your average joe understand that USAID is a intelligence agency spinoff designed to sound "good" while doing evil all over the world rather than what its name suggests? You know... Aid?

The NSA, CIA, Extraordinary Rendition and so many other things dont exist there by accident, if said """government""" wishes to spend such amounts of money and resources to enact such evil under the veil of security, then i dont know about you, but then that to me and several other people just reads as "US Gov being flat out evil"

Do remember that there was *wide* support and acceptance back on the Kennedy days to just dissolve the CIA

> Levine tries to lump all of this in with surveillance.

I am not particularly kind to the guy, but he's just merely looking at it on a holistic system design level, any programmer minded person would do the exact same thing when presented with a black box problem

But as far as the foodstamps go, wouldn't it be great if the system where set up in such a way as that foodstamps where not needed to begin with? And on the flipside, why would "the government" allow for such a societal structure where the maintenance of "foodstamps" is necessary for the organization of the nation? I see that last bit in particular if anything as a national security problem...

As Clintonites would say: "It is the economy stupid"

It seems obvious that USAID is an intelligence front (I've encountered a few instances where it was mentioned that someone worked for USAID at the time, while it was simultaneously obvious that it would make way more sense if they were Intelligence), but is there any concrete evidence for that?

> any concrete evidence

What do you mean by "concrete evidence"?

Nothing of this is disputed, they even have their own wikipedia pages for their different operations and branches within USAID

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Public_Safety

*Specially* that we are talking of USAID, on the case of NED for example, things get slightly murkier because then it is a matter of private rather than public record, but it still works as a tool for management of semi-clandestine operations and operations which need plausible deniability from CIA's end, or at least as much deniability as it can muster, tho these days they prefer to work with shell groups and other associated partners such as for example Atlas Network, Radio Free Asia also falls on that category, same with Voice Of America

If you are interested in books both, Killing Hope by William Blum and Legacy Of Ashes by Weiner are very, very, very good authoritative sources on the matter

If you prefer podcasts, Warnerd Radio has a couple very good episodes on the National Endowment For Democracy, tho they both quote excerpts of the books above

Radio War Nerd EP 274 — National Endowment for Democracy, Part 1 https://podcastaddict.com/episode/121232504

Radio War Nerd EP 275 — National Endowment for Democracy, Part 2 https://podcastaddict.com/episode/121522126

Yes, there is concrete evidence--specifically, the Office of Public Safety mentioned by Cyanbird, was an official cover given to CIA personnel to train local and national police forces in puppet countries how to fight a 'countersingurgency'. This included setting up national ID cards to track everyone, NSA style signals intelligence, and extensive use of torture. One of their favorite methods was to use portable US army telephones, as they had a hand crank generator capable of producing enough current/voltage to torture but were unlikely to cause cardiac arrest, they had an obvious non-torture use case so ordering them was not suspicious, and they had very fine wires that could be inserted up the urethra or stuck between teeth to deliver very painful electric shocks to sensitive areas. Dan Mitrione was a USAID OPS guy who was killed in South America in the 70s (Uruguay, i believe) in retaliation for his role in abuse and torture, who was known for adbucting homeless people upon whom his trainees could practice their torture techniques. The 1980 documentary "Inside the Company" about the CIA lays this out very well. It's long but is worth a watch, and I have seen no comparable films exposing this level of CIA activity since. Vietnam and the Phoenix Program is another classic example. John Manopoli was officially working for OPS in USAID, but was in fact CIA, and he first implemented the national ID card program they used to generate the lists of thousands of names of folks to abduct, torture, and either imprison or kill, and he was also instrumental in that part of the plan as well. Almost the only references to John Manopoli are in books about torture in the Phoenix program, or listings in USAID OPS phone books, or a handful of official OPS papers showing he did the same type of work in a handful of other countries.

While those programs certainly existed this is blatant a false equivocation, you can still have humanitarian programs while being a military hegemony. It's not one or the other.

This is in fact a distinct reason CIA/NSA (and vice versa) won't accept recruits who have served in the peace corp previously, amongst other reasons.

>my own Lantern

Brilliant reposte, but I am curious what software are you referring to here?

A quick look through their comment submissions points at https://www.getlantern.org/:

  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20824759#20826587

Signal isn't funded by the military, by OTF/BBG, or any branch of the USG government. People who claim otherwise are confused (deeply) about a program OTF ran that sponsored third-party security reviews and development projects (summer-of-code style), none of which was mediated through OTF --- it was just a bucket of money.

You should be extremely skeptical about people who bring OTF/BBG up in these discussions. I have complicated feelings about Tor stemming mostly from culture and effectiveness concerns and would push back on claims that it's co-opted by the Navy or corporate interests, but at least I can see a clear (if silly) line connecting Tor to these supposed conflicts of interest.

As I understand it the technology behind Tor is strengthened by an arms race. You want several different well-funded entities running nodes, because that makes the service better for everybody. Even if some of those entities are hostile they still help unless one entity controls a large portion of interior nodes and even then you're only giving metadata to that single entity (whichever it is) by using Tor, not anybody else - which is better than you're going to do with alternative technologies.

This analogy unfortunately cuts both ways, if you've got technology that undermines the majority government / power structure in a secure fashion, you'll always have the ability to come in as a intelligence agency and foment an insurgency movement.

Which also unfortunately points to them having exploits no one has discovered yet in said technology tools.

They can still maintain generalized situational control via additional superiority vectors(MASINT, HUMINT, GEOINT, OSINT, FININT etc.)

> Signal isn't funded by the military

Correct, it is not funded by "the military", but this is incorrect

> any branch of the USG government

Because Signal/TextSecure received considerable amounts of seed capital from Radio Free Asia which is a CIA spinoff with the explicit aim to fund the development of the cryptography at grass roots level, not per se to have full control of it like NSA would have done, but because having strong cryptography on such platforms (Telegram might be other) is highly effective against perceived US enemies like well... Iran, or Syria, and to allow their assets/agents to communicate more easily while abroad without bulky extra proprietary phones or software

All of that above is mentioned at length on Surveillance Valley btw

It's like you read 4 words from my comment and stopped.

Ulbricht was caught via poor OPSEC and not via a Firefox/Tor 0day afaik. Though there was/is speculation that a Firefox/Tor 0day was used to bring down some Tor markets and possibly to locate the Silk Road's server. Silk Road 2.0 was brought down in like a few months, which could indicate such a 0day existed. Or that it was ran by some former Silk Road staff members who got doxed when Silk Road 1.0 was shut down.

Ulbricht was caught because an FBI agent, who would read things slowly and twice, recognized these 4 letters : heyy.

That's how Ulbricht sometimes spelled hey, and the agent had seen that particular spelling before in his investigation, in an email from Ulbrict’s student email address.

Nick Bilton's book “American Kingpin: The Epic Hunt for the Criminal Mastermind Behind the Silk Road” is a great read, highly recommended.

That's what they want you to think. He was caught because; Nothing can match against the surveillance arsenal of the NSA.

That's not what I think, that's what Nick Bilton thinks. The quality of his book makes me partial to his thesis, of course, but NSA conspiracy blah adds nothing.

Also, lots more went into catching him than just heyy, but that was the lucky break that had him caught. Now he shares a prison with Dr. Unabomber Kazinsky.

That could be the story but since parallel construction is routinely used to hide the existence of surveillance tools and back doors it’s not unreasonable to doubt it.

I thought I had heard it was stackoverflow, is that looped in somehow?

I don't recall StackOverflow being mentioned, no, but it's been a few years since I've read it.

https://slate.com/technology/2013/10/silk-road-s-dread-pirat...

Correction: He was transferred to a penitentiary in Tucson, Arizona.

Have to admit. I was impressed with the USGOVs ability to recover bitcoin ransoms paid for cyberattacks. I'm not sure if impressed is the right word.

it strikes me as extremely naive to take this at face value. see https://www.reuters.com/article/us-dea-sod-idUSBRE97409R2013...

much more likely -- sigint tooling was applied to identify ulbricht, bulk metadata was turned over for his comms history, and it was pored over for things they could connect with sr to get warrants. imo, at least.

but getting to claim you're such a sharp investigator that you can figure it out by noticing the word heyy makes for a much better story to tell an author.

It was more complicated than just heyy, but I won't spoil the book.

It's been awhile since I've read it, but my impression was that solving the case was mostly traditional casework, and a lot of it, by many different people/agents/agencies.

That Reuters article certainly gives pause. Thanks for the link.

Wtf, who doesn’t add extra y’s to hey sometimes? That wasn’t evidence.

I don't want to spoil the book; but, yes, that detail got him caught.

It’s not fiction you’re spoiling, but a factual conversation about events that you’re not going into due to spoilers. It is an odd defence that kills the conversation when other people bring up good points.

The parallel construction argument seems way more plausible if there’s nothing else besides “heyy”. If there is more, please say what it is instead of mentioning it exists but refusing to say it.

Where is any evidence of Tor being a military surveillance project? I find it hard to believe an open source project like this has been infiltrated. Yes, there is suspicion some ECC curves are compromised, but only the ones provided by NIST. I'd really like to see evidence of Tor.

The seed for that line of thinking is the fact that a US Navy lab built it.[0] Having said that, I believe that's the only basis and is a far cry from making the theory convincing or even probable.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tor_(network)

Wow, I feel like an idiot. All this time I had no idea the Navy built it, when a simple Wiki search would have pointed that out. Thanks!

“The Navy built it” is a bit of an exaggeration. Paul Syverson did early work on it at the Naval Research Lab, and Roger Dingledine and Nick Mathewson added to the collaboration at approximately the same time, with neither having anything to do with the Navy. That’s the extent of the military connection - some relationship in the first year or so of an 18 year or so project.

There's a been a suspiciously downplayed number of ephemeral hidden services that get raided / internationally taken down on the Tor network for it to be mere circumstance.

No one tries to take notice since they're hosting the worst content on the internet regularly.

Could as well be insiders though and operations that were planned for years.

Did you even click on the link? Signal gives away NOTHING.

Thank you. I never knew the source of the ridiculous theory that the internet sprang from spying attempts on the Vietnamese. I am always looking for keywords to filter conspiracy weirdos. Yasha Levine added

"are the fact that current privacy movements like Tor, Signal, OTF, BBG are fundamentally military funded and survive on government contracts."

Are those "facts" avaiable for investigating, without having to buy the book?

(that Tor is partly US administration funded is known, but Signal? And what is OTF and BGG?)

https://www.opentech.fund/results/supported-projects/open-wh...

Funded by Open Technology Fund (OTF) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Technology_Fund

Which is funded by Radio Free Asia (RFA) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Free_Asia. It had a few reboots but was created as a CIA program in 1951 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Free_Asia_(Committee_for...) to blast shortwaves into China from Manilla to try to overthrow the Chinese government. Rebooted more recently since the advent of the great firewall of China.

Wow, that is so thin it is transparent. If this is the sort of 'proof' that we are going to find then I am glad you posted the ref here so that I could add yet another kook to the list of those whose privacy/security rantings and books I can ignore. The biggest danger to long-term privacy projects is not the risk of taking advantage of an opportune partnership with a government agency when incentives align, it is conspiracy nutjobs poisoning the well with their paranoia and delusions.

And Signal?

The main tool, used for private communication?

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