Hacker News Reader

Comment by kevin_thibedeau | Hacker News Reader

MIT runs Lincoln Lab which is a think tank / R&D facility for the military. You have to pass through an armed checkpoint to get to the the complex located on an AF base. I would consider that node compromised already.

View on HN

Note that 'the military' and 'a hypothetical government agency opposed to Tor' are not necessarily the same thing.

Counterintuitively sometimes the best protection is to operate under another agency. That makes moving against Tor a battle of internal politics rather than a legal battle.

'The government' rarely has uniform views on something as complex as Tor.

The mistake of course being that the military (and the CIA, it's very useful for their assets) is pro-TOR and were the ones who developed it. It's the FBI/NSA that are anti-TOR. The government is rarely monolithic, especially when it comes to the security divisions.

It's not monolithic but power is magnified. A branch of the military relying on Tor for operational security ensures that the DoD will be at least split on officially sanctioning the technology.

I'm confused. Are you saying that the MIT Tor node is at Lincoln Lab, or are you suggesting that anything MIT-affiliated is tainted because of LL?

You realize that Tor came out of the US Naval Research Laboratory, right?

https://www.torproject.org/about/overview

It's also open source. Can we stop with this fucking red herring already? He's talking about a service, right now, under the direct control of the US military. You're talking about grant funding for an open source tool.

Stop.

No, he's not. He's talking about a single research laboratory MIT runs on a military base. Which somehow makes the entire university under direct control of the military?

FWIW according to the listserv traffic at MIT CSAIL right now, some members of the community seem to believe that the TOR node lives in CSAIL, not LL.

Assuming the PTR RRs are accurate, that would appear to be true:

  $ traceroute 128.31.0.39
  ...
  15  mitnet.trantor.csail.mit.edu (18.4.7.65)  40.218 ms  40.661 ms  40.900 ms
  16  asperta.helicon.csail.mit.edu (128.30.0.246)  45.345 ms  47.082 ms *
  17  belegost.csail.mit.edu (128.31.0.39)  44.074 ms !X  45.023 ms !X  45.549 ms !X

I have 0 Trust on MIT, since Aaron Swartz incident. I consider that place no more than deep shit.

I Don't want to believe, if I can trust a Tor Network passing through that gate in MIT

Reply on news.ycombinator.com