NSA and GCHQ agents 'leak Tor bugs' alleges developer | Hacker News Reader

NSA and GCHQ agents 'leak Tor bugs' alleges developer

bbc.co.uk

22 pointsescapologybb14 comments

Ah, the lovely slant of the article. It's an evil tool used by pedophiles. It's an evil tool used by drug addicts. Oh, a few activists and stuff use it, but it's used by the terrorists hiding under your bed. The BBC logo may be red, but the journalism is out and out yellow.

Couldn't agree more. You can see them trying their damnedest to minimise the use of activists make of Tor, every point about an activist is bracketed with the evil paedophiles and drug dealers.

Everybody hide!

The BBC is probably one of the worst news sources there is. I'm not sure where they got their reputation from...

Always get your news from multiple sources.

This is why I like Google News. Despite my usual reflexive dislike of Google products, it's a decent mash of lots of different sources.

I find the BBC to be very good for most topics, generally better than e.g. the Guardian or other 'broadsheet' newspapers.

BUT I have been shocked/amazed by the BBC coverage of Snowden - their silence was often deafening. From what I have seen this last year or so, they are definitely severely biased and/or muzzled on some topics - presumably following pressure by the UK govt.

Yes I've noticed that. If a subject is not compatible with current government whim, there is always silence.

This whole interview and admonition is odd, and well to be completely frank idiotic.

Lets break it down:

Option 1: This isn't true at all, at best some people leak some stuff pretending to be members of the Intelligence community of C3/4I organisations.

Option 2: This is an NSA/GCHQ op designed to push them further from the real exploits they use e.g. every time they feel they get close they throw them a bone to distract them

Option 3: This is an NSA/GCHQ op designed to infiltrate the TOR community by allowing people to gain the respect and trust of TOR's inner circle in order to gain additional information about this project.

Option 4: These are real NSA/GCHQ employees/contractors in which case he just might have triggered another internal witch hunt which puts his sources at risk and puts TOR and it's members under even more scrutiny by the Intelligence and LEO communities.

None of these scenarios have a positive outcome on neither the project or the personal lives of the people involved and any one with a shred of common sense would have kept their mouths shut about this.

But hey expecting common sense from these guys is not something these people seem to be capable off lately. TOR is a great tool which is sadly used by most of it's users for illegitimate and in many cases illegal activities. Any one who spent some time on TOR knows that for the most part the vast majority of the traffic although "harmless" does not originates from reporters which working on some huge story or some people trying to bring out news out of N. Korea. Heck TOR for the most part is unusable in countries which monitor and sensor internet traffic since even with all the improvement made to it is still very easy to tell when some one uses TOR and if you do it in say Iran or N. Korea at best you should expect a prison sentence. And this is why TOR has probably several orders of magnitude more traffic originating from some bored dutch script kiddies who are running SQLmap on some p0rn site than from people who should actually be protected by a system like this. If the TOR Project and the IFF would actually accept the fact that it's not used or it's not usable for the intended purpose and actually work on tools which will allow people from countries that implement wide internet control and censorship(like the UK!) to actually use them in a way that would not only be "unprovable" but completely undetectable since lets face it proof or not if N.K. things you did something wrong it's the same thing as you did something wrong. So yes while TOR might be used by "activists" anyone who thinks that the majority of it's traffic is not generated by script kiddies, criminal organisations and worse is just fooling them selves. And while it's not an excuse to ban or kill the project just like the fact that majority of BitTorrent traffic is compromised of material which violates copyright laws is not an excuse to shut it down. However the fact that TOR fails to protect and serve the users that needs it the MOST should be something that these vanguards of "freedom and privacy" better start looking into...

Glad to see there are middle grounds for whistleblowers - they can quietly counteract their orgs' exploitation of security vulnerabilities

This article is worthless; they took two sentences out of the full interview[1] and blew it up into a whole article. The actual interview is much better, but even then someone at the BBC couldn't resist putting a stupid title on it.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8211566

Here[0] is the previous HN discussion of this, submitted 10 hours earlier:

[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8210319

So, does anybody actually think this has some validity? Do we think that there are people within the TLA's secretly helping the Tor project?

I doubt it. I imagine the information goes one way - from the outside world into GCHQ.

They only just (within the past few years) released work that Turing did. It's unlikely they'd be releasing information about tor.

I'd think they'd have their own fork of tor.

Having said that, GCHQ do fund crypto research and they do have various math collaborations so who knows.

The Turing stuff was officially released the implication in the article is that the info coming from gchq is unofficial.

Yes, my reading of the article was that it was coming from anonymous sources. Who knows, it could be from another couple of Snowdens or could even be another sneaky beaky plot to degrade Tor's anonymity.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com