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Comment by hastur | Hacker News Reader

Wow, this is awesome.

While the world's biggest "democracy" (India) censors the web, Swedish government sponsors means of dissidence.

I, as an Indian am tired of the 'World's Biggest Democracy' label. I feel it is a clever way for India's politicians to mask huge problems we face as a democracy - rampant social inequality, throwing money at problems that need creative solutions cotinuous effort and commitment etc.

Except for very few states, turn up for elections seldom crosses 50%. If the number of people participating is the measure for biggest, I would think there are other places with bigger participation in the electoral process.

    >huge problems.. social inequality.. turn up for elections seldom crosses 50%

Sorry to be depressing, but that sounds pretty par-for-the-course democracy to me. Particularly the turn out.

As an American in politics, I dearly wish I could get 35% of my countrymen to vote in the elections that most impact their lives.

FYI, Tor was originally sponsored by the US Naval Research Lab, and the US has always been a pretty bad player in this regard (though more so now than in the past).

whenever I discuss Tor with people who have just enough knowledge to be dangerous, I hear "yea, but it was funded by the US so it probably has a backdoor/wouldn't be funded if they couldn't read the data".

I don't agree with that, but what can you say other than "it's open source so many eyeballs are auditing it"?

Besides that, I use to say that I would not put a backdoor in the system used by my spies to communicate. It would be really dangerous for me if it fallen in the wrong hands.

if messageSigned (msg, nsaPublicKey): obey

Now hide that.

Any backdoor in TOR that could remain hidden for so long would have to be a protocol flaw. Implementation changes too much to rely on an obfuscated 'bug' and anything as straightforward as your suggestion would simply be found and removed immediately.

Protocol flaws can of course be found and used by anyone.

I am no expert, but I thought the weakness of tor was that a goverment could control many of the exit nodes (combied with timing attacks to find the user?), since most users don't want to run them for fear of being arrested for whatever the users were doing on the network?

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