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Tor Project Aims To Eclipse US Government Funding
An anonymous reader writes Developed by the U.S. Navy and the recipient of millions of dollars of government grants, the Tor Project is now aiming to ween itself off dependence of U.S. government funds "including setting a goal of 50 percent non-U.S. government funding by 2016." The initiative comes after months of discussion over what some vocal critics deemed a contradiction in funding and purpose.
An outmoded privacy technique hosted on US servers, developed by the US military, and mapped by US intelligence agencies shouldn't get so much money from the US government? I'm all for reduced government spending but as an issue of principle it seems like bailing water out of a sinking canoe with a thimble.
I'd make a slightly more specific distinction: As best we can tell, architectural development of TOR went fairly well as a fed project. It hasn't been wholly without issues; but it has a track record that many projects would envy, and it appears to vex the NSA.
Operations, though, is a dangerous sore point(even if there were no visible fed money at all): It isn't news that TOR becomes markedly more vulnerable if the adversary has control of a sufficiently high percentage of nodes, nor is it clear that such a flaw can be corrected even in principle. It also isn't news that the TOR network is not terribly large by the standards of somebody with actual money to spend on hosting. The fed money I'd be deeply worried about isn't the Office of Naval Research, or whoever was funding it as a way for diplomats and CIA agents to access the net less obviously, paying a few programmers, it's the potential for a relatively modest amount of spending on boring commercial VPS instances through an array of suitable shell companies bringing the whole place down by brute force.