\nThe Washington Post<\/a>
\nSeptember 6, 2013<\/p>\n
This week, we learned that the NSA had managed to circumvent much of the encryption that secures online financial transactions and other activities we take for granted on the Internet. How? By inserting backdoors into the very commercial software designed to keep sensitive medical records, bank files and other information private.<\/p>\n
The NSA\u2019s sustained attempt to get around encryption calls into question many of the technologies people have come to rely on to avoid surveillance. One indispensable tool is Tor, the anonymizing service that takes a user\u2019s Internet traffic and spits it out from some other place on the Web so that its origin is obscured.<\/p>\n
So far there\u2019s no hard evidence that the government has compromised the anonymity of Tor traffic. But some on a Tor-related e-mail list recently pointed out that a substantial chunk of the Tor Project\u2019s 2012 operating budget came from the Department of Defense, which houses the NSA.
\n![\"(The](\"http:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/blogs\/the-switch\/files\/2013\/09\/Screen-Shot-2013-09-06-at-3.04.51-PM.png\")
<\/p>\n
Last year, DoD funding accounted for more than 40 percent of the Tor Project\u2019s $2 million budget. Other major donors include the U.S. State Department, which has an interest in promoting Internet freedom globally, and the National Science Foundation. Add up all those sources, and the government covers 60 percent of the costs of Tor\u2019s development.<\/p>\n
Tor Executive Director Andrew Lewman wrote in an e-mail to users that just because the project accepts federal funding does not mean it collaborated with the NSA to unmask people\u2019s online identities.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe parts of the U.S. and Swedish governments that fund us through contracts want to see strong privacy and anonymity exist on the Internet in the future,\u201d Lewman wrote. \u201cDon\u2019t assume that \u2018the government\u2019 is one coherent entity with one mindset.\u201d<\/p>\n
And Roger Dingledine, a founder of the Tor Project, says that the Defense Department money is much more like a research grant than a procurement contract.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey aren\u2019t \u2018buying products\u2019 from us,\u201d Dingledine tells me. \u201cThey\u2019re funding general research and development on better anonymity, better performance and scalability and better blocking-resistance. Everything we do we publish in the open.\u201d<\/p>\n
Dingledine acknowledges that \u201cbad guys\u201d could conceivably introduce vulnerabilities into Tor\u2019s open-source code. But one of the major advantages of open-source software is that the product can be inspected by anyone for defects, which raises its security somewhat. There\u2019d only be a problem if the NSA were somehow able to insert malicious code that nobody recognized.<\/p>\n
The NSA didn\u2019t immediately respond to a request for comment Friday afternoon.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Brian Fung The Washington Post September 6, 2013 This week, we learned that the NSA had managed to circumvent much of the encryption that secures online financial transactions and other activities we take for granted on the Internet. How? By inserting backdoors into the very commercial software designed to keep sensitive medical records, bank files […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-66455","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-breaking-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66455","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=66455"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66455\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=66455"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=66455"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=66455"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}