8 October 2012

Tor Being Used by Thousands of Bradley Mannings

A writes:

TOR management seems deathly quiet about US Navy funding. Any further background?

Cryptome:

We found several documents which describe the Navy's current funding for Tor-related research in order to boost Tor's use by the Navy for communications. More fully described at the web page of DARPA's SAFER program.

From that page we traced the the Navy contract to SRI International as pass-through to Tor as well as to several research projects aimed at enhancing Tor. Many of these included Tor researchers on the team.

For these see the five listings on Cryptome's offsite section.

Following five items relate to DoD Tor Project funding and research through Navy
pass-through SRI International Contract No. N66001-11-C-4002 for $1,230,571 of which
$503,706 (below) went to the Tor Project.

2012-00685            Safer Warfighter Communications Program          October 6, 2012
2012-00685            Safer Warfighter Communications Solicitation     October 6, 2012
2012-00684            Evading Censorship with Browser-Based Proxies    October 6, 2012
2012-00683            StegoTorus: A Camouflage Proxy for Tor           October 6, 2012
2012-00682            Bootstrapping Comms into Anti-Censorship System  October 6, 2012

http://cryptome.org/2012/10/tor-financial-2011.pdf (downloaded from Tor Project)

Further, you may recall the Tor inventors' and later developers' assertion that the greater the number of Tor users the better the camouflage for cloaking Tor users in the roiling tumult.

And, as well, Tor developers crowing about submerging millions of users of other programs into the Tor torrent -- with or without their knowledge. For example, Mike Perry proposed grabbing the data of millions of users of Do-Not Track (not sure if that was done, maybe explained on the Tor fora).

I would guess that the open disclosure of Navy funding indicates success at establishing sufficient camouflage for military, government and their contractors/NGOs use as well as having established sufficient means to covertly monitor Tor to assure security against breaches and attacks.

It would also put on public notice that the military has a protective role in Tor, for defensive or aggressive possibilities against abusers, attackers and skeptics. It provides a USG warning of don't cyber-mess with Tor or cruise missiles/drones will be heading toward your server farms, power grids and GPS'd log-on locations.

As a US patriot taxed for unending warmongering and profiteering I am comforted that most of Tor's funds now openly come from USG outsourcing by military, diplomatic and scientific research, that Tor is now a wholly, openly Tor.gov.com. No need to protest innocence, it is now an NGO bribery done deal among many others duped into cloaking Tor's patriotic mission to propagandize and advance USG's interests above all others through procurement of the unpaid services thousands of volunteers as grunts.

The disclosure could be ruse, to be sure, as with anything associated with the military or government.

A beffuddled mind might suspect a cyberwar is going on in Tor between those running it and those which are using it for anti-government purposes not to the liking of the USG, by going deeper into the onion than the onion inventors envisioned to covertly monitor Tor users. That the Navy has discovered the betrayal of the betrayers and is engaged in cyberwar yet to be disclosed, maybe not fully understood. Could be that thousands of Bradley Mannings are continuing to do the right thing with Tor.

Hillary Clinton said recently that is what freedom of speech means.

Approved for unlimited distribution.