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Comment by jakear | Hacker News Reader

...besides the US Government, TOR's largest benefactor by far. In case anyone needed reminding.

https://www.torproject.org/static/findoc/2020-TorProject-For...

I can totally imagine they're using Tor for some undercover (foreign) operations or similar. I don't think the US Government with all its branches is known to practise exactly what it preaches.

I think what you have identified is that the US government is not, in any sense of the word, an it.

Of course, this is basically why they invented it in the first place.

And why they open sourced it. All the fancy onion routing would be useless if the fact that you use it already identified you as a CIA spy. They need other people to use it as well for TOR to be useful to them.

> I can totally imagine they're using Tor for some undercover (foreign) operations or similar. I don't think the US Government with all its branches is known to practise exactly what it preaches.

The US government has different parts with different goals: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2013/10/05... (paywalled). IIRC, the NSA has interests in conducting surveillance, and the State Department has interests in allowing liberal foreign dissidents to defeat surveillance.

Ironically meaning that the gov does the cat and mouse game with itself. Self-reinforcement learning. Quite an effective optimization method if we're being honest.

The US Government also funded and build the Internet (or at least ARPAnet). The government also benefits from Tor being actually anonymous.

It is worth being aware of course, but to my knowledge we have no evidence that Federal law enforcement has used anything other than old fashioned detective work to solve any Tor related cases.

There's always the possibility of parallel construction, but I would expect some reasonable evidence supporting this in some high profile busts.

It would however be common sense that the US gov. Wouldn't burn a TOR 0-day (or other means of breaking tor anonymity) for anything but the highest of high profile cases, especially considering it would end up in court records.

They can either spy and let it slide because 1 guy buying weed on whatever replaced the silk road isn't worth that, or they can find the guy, arrest him if he's done something big enough and invent a way they found him. Hell, they could even say they found him on clearnet, the guy isn't gona go "your honor, i sure did buy those illegal drugs online but i used TOR so how did they find out"

My current biggest reason to believe TOR isn't breached on a massive scale is that snowden had nothing to show about it.

I'm not sure which page of the link above (the tax return) I'm supposed to look at... Where does it say the US govt is funding Tor, and if so, by what amount are they funding Tor?

page 10 lists over 2 million in government grants

So about half of their revenue in 2020, according to that same page.

And I assume they have no means to spy on TOR traffic. :D

Au contraire: https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/02/08/349016/a-dark-we...

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