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Ask HN: Did you know that TOR is 60% sponsored by US Gov?

12 points by fluential ↗ HN
Via: https://www.torproject.org/about/findoc/2012-TorProject-Annual-Report.pdf

I've read about it here: http://fowlchicago.wordpress.com/2013/04/25/tor-project-2012-financial-report-60-of-our-funding-comes-from-the-u-s-government/ What do you think?

4 comments

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gesman
US Gov maintains lots of exit nodes as well as other related network infrastructures to make sure they're ... hmmm.. not the last to know ...
jlgreco
A pox upon you for asking me a question but not making this a poll!

But yes, this is a fairly widely known fact. I expect that most heavy users probably know this, but it still surprises a lot of people (can't count the number of times I've heard people say "TOR? Oh, the government will shut that down if it ever gets popular."

secstate
No, I didn't know that. But there aren't a lot of options out there for anonymizing your browsing habits, and TOR has the benefit of being open source. The other issue with this, or any distributed system, is that the effectiveness is directly proportional to the number of users in the system. Fine, the FED controls end points, but it can't possibly control all of them. As more people join TOR it's powers of anonymity increase. Run one of your own, and have faith that your fellow hackers will do the same.

Nothing happens amongst us humans without some amount of faith. You can dump a pile of negativity on the state of our country, but at some point you've got to trust someone, for at least 60 to 100 years and enjoy the sunshine.

There's some serious tinfoil hat stuff going on in that blog link there. And this is coming from someone who still keeps one foot firmly in the camp of 9/11 being at least in part an inside job and running a diversified gentleman farm so that when the electric grid fails my family wont starve for the first six months.

Let us all stay ever vigilant, but remember the good things the Internet, representative democracy and modern infrastructure have granted us (for one, the ability to complain openly about the Gov't without being executed, most of the time ;p ).