Carnegie Mellon Denies FBI Paid For Tor-Breaking Research (wired.com)

New submitter webdesignerdudes writes with news that Carnegie Mellon University now implies it may have been subpoenaed to give up its anonymity-stripping technique, and that it was not paid $1 million by the FBI for doing so. Wired reports: "In a terse statement Wednesday, Carnegie Mellon wrote that its Software Engineering Institute hadn’t received any direct payment for its Tor research from the FBI or any other government funder. But it instead implied that the research may have been accessed by law enforcement through the use of a subpoena. 'In the course of its work, the university from time to time is served with subpoenas requesting information about research it has performed,' the statement reads. 'The university abides by the rule of law, complies with lawfully issued subpoenas and receives no funding for its compliance.'"

Comments

Re:Liars

[Frobnicator]

"hadn’t received any direct payment for its Tor research from the FBI or any other government funder"...

So they have received indirect payments or have received direct payments from non-government funders.

Yes, that is exactly true. I'm assuming you didn't read the actual statement by the school.

It begins: "Carnegie Mellon University includes the Software Engineering Institute, which is a federally funded research and development center (FFRDC) established specifically to focus on software-related security and engineering issues."

So there you go, a blatant admission to an indirect payment. The government did not say "We will pay you to develop this specific technology" which would have been direct. The government told that lab, and many more, "Here is money to research this type of technology generally", and the lab happened to fund that project among many others, yielding an indirect payment. What most people probably didn't expect, the lab included, was that they would get a subpoena demanding the research.

While the tin-foil hat may be necessary elsewhere, no need for it here. The lab has always openly admitted to the indirect funding from federal grants. In their research papers, and in fact in the vast majority of university research papers, there is a line about the grants funding the lab. That is a non-secret.