Comment by throwaway37821

>spread democracy

i have to say that i love that phrase, it is peak propaganda that just works.

> Perhaps that, rather than a technical limitation, is the reason most high-profile arrests related to TOR involve criminals making some other mistake, rather than the security of the network itself being compromised.

I have no doubt that the government doesn't want to demonstrate how weak Tor is to the public, but it's also got to be dead simple to find those kinds of "other mistakes" they can use when they've identified the person they're looking for and can monitor whatever they do.

> The original purpose of TOR was to provide agents and handlers with a means of secure communication, allowing them to organize subversive or espionage activities. It was created by the Department of Defense to propagate their interests and spread democracy around the world using these secure capabilities.

Do you think the EFF was in on it, duped, or just thought multiple competing interests could be served?

After talking to my Democracy Officer I have to say I love managed democracy!

Ah yes, 'spread democracy around the world'

> It provides a channel for operatives to exfiltrate data out of non-NATO countries very easily.

I'm not convinced this is the case. For example China's gfw has been very effective at blocking TOR traffic, and any TOR connection in other countries is like announcing to the government that you are suspicious.

> The US benefits from the TOR being private.

Slight correction: The US benefits from TOR being private to _everyone but the US_

  > the US Navy

For Tor to be effective for hiding spies it has to be used by the public. Even if it's only nefarious actors (say spies + drug dealers + terrorists) it adds noise that the adversary needs to sort through.

What I fucking hate about many of these conspiracies is how silly it is once you ever work with or for any government entities. You can't get two police agencies in neighboring cities to communicate with one another. The bureaucrats are fucking slow as shit and egotistical as fuck.

It's important to remember that the government and even a single agency (like the NSA) is just as chaotic, disconnected, and full of competing entities as any big tech company has (if not worse). Yeah, most of the NSA is focused offense, but there's groups working on defense. Those groups are 100% at odds. This is true for the 18 intelligence agencies. They have different objectives and many times they are at odds with one another and you bet each one wants to be getting credit for anything.

The US involvement should warrant suspicion and with any technology like Tor you should always be paranoid. But it's not proof. Because guess what, the US wants people in other countries to use high levels of encryption to hide from their authoritarian governments while the US can promote democracy movements and help put a friendly leader into a position of power. AT THE SAME TIME they also want to spy on their own people (and there are plenty of people in the gov that don't want this). Inconsistency is the default because it's a bunch of different people with different objectives. So the US gov both wants Tor to be secure and broken at the same time.

You know what else was funded by the US government? Computers, the Internet and GPS. Also Signal (via OTF funded by Congress).

I dont see how TOR is better than just spinning up a server on the public cloud for each asset. Since each asset would have a different IP they couldnt use one assets knowledge to catch the others. Non-NATO countries tend to monitor internet traffic and so would know if you access TOR.

What? Tor is a honeypot? I don't think so. What do you instead expect me to use instead of tor?

You do know Hitler was the German Reichskanzler, not French?

But not all traffic goes to onion sites.