Dreaming at Dusk: the Tor Project’s NFT Auction & What’s Next

I am a Tor user/contributor who is very concerned with human rights, social justice, and environmental issues, so I am very glad that you are aware of the criticism that NFTs might be bad for the environment (if they become widely used). That said, I am very glad that you obtained 2 million USD and I like the uses you mention!

On Southern outreach I agree that Amazonia should be high priority because this is one of the regions where indigenous/environmental activists (and the global environment) are most endangered, but I also point to cartel murders and endemic corruption among "security authorities" in Mexico as a phenomenon where I hope Tor (and Tails) can possibly play a helpful role. On the brighter side, currently there is hope of serious political reform in Chile, a country which already has a local Tor community, so I hope TP can stay in touch with activists there during this critical time in the political development of Chile.

Any chance the Arti rewrite of Tor in Rust could possibly enable a completely new version of secure messaging using the Signal protocol? IMO an important issue to bear in mind as TP tries to enable citizens to use Tor products on their smart phones is that many activists lack enough secure income to purchase top of the line smart phones, so I hope TP will try to make "Tor for smart phone" and even "Signal for smart phone" usable (safely) on low end phones.

I acknowledge that this will be challenging, because makers of low end phones and low end WiFi Telecoms like Cricket (owned by ATT) and TracFone (owned by Verizon) have absolutely horrendous multiple insecurities and seem to feel free to engage in particularly abusive practices which endanger their customers. Recall for example that Cricket was stripping StartTLS from emails sent via Cricket phones even before being bought out by ATT (see the old EFF blog post), the US telecom with the longest history of close cooperation with NSA on various covert dragnet surveillance programs. Further, TracFone was formerly owned by Carlos Slim, who could be called Latin America's analog of Bezos and Zuckerberg; Tracfone has also engaged in many abusive practices over the years.

I am a serial whistleblower ;-/ who has racked up a few successes over the years (we often fail to persuade journalists to write about leaks, but sometimes we are pleasantly surprised), so I have good reason for being happy whenever I see maintenance, auditing, and development work being done to protect whistle-blowers. So thanks for putting money towards supporting Secure Drop.

I would like to point out (again) that IMHO several troubling and widely reported phenomena provide an opportunity for Tor Project to reach out to journalists and US politicians:

o widespread adoption of such insecure products as Zoom for all manner of US federal/state/local and US school and US healthcare functions during the pandemic lockdown,

o state-sponsored cyberattacks (including supply chain attacks) on a critical software/hardware infrastructure widely used by US government agencies, US healthcare providers, and NGOs (especially healthcare and human rights orgs),

o ransomware attacks on US city government networks, health care providers, etc.

o state-sponsored cyberattacks on US power grid, pipeline infrastructure, and food production.

I believe TP should be pointing out the products like OnionShare, if the Tor network and Onionshare itself can be scaled up to handle greatly increased load, appear to offer much safer methods of sharing securely small files between USG agencies, between patients and healthcare providers, etc. A typical example: years after unencrypted faxes were banned in the EU, it is still routine for sensitive medical information to be sent over unencrypted fax; these are often small files pertaining to a single client which would be better sent via OnionShare IMO.

See an op-ed by a terribly misguided RAND thinktanker published today in The Hill:

TheHill.com
How COVID-19 lessons can transform US mental health care
Ryan K. McBain, opinion contributor
2 Jun 2021

What he (and Big Tech) is urging is exactly the wrong way to go at a time when endemic insecurities in US cyberthings are under such determined sophisticated and damaging attacks; c.f. the Vastaamo breach in Finland which shows the inevitable outcome in the US if McBain and friends get their way. Alas, big checks written by Big Tech lobbyists may outweigh input from TP, but I hope you will at last try to reach out to US politicians who will only hear disinformation FUD from FBI unless TP works with EFF and ACLU to counter the disastrously wrong-headed FBI messaging.

Further, I speculate that possibly university researchers should try to find some way to use OnionShare to send commands to remote power grid equipment over the Tor network, which might lead to a replacement for SCADA, years in the future. I think this would be very hard but the payoff would be enormous. Basically, it seems to me that USG is rushing to embrace insecure "newer" teletechnologies like Zoom while clinging to insecure old technologies like fax machines, when it should be embracing Tor network as something which USG and US critical infrastructure and US healthcare providers should all be using (with appropriate donations of many many fast Tor servers and whatever else is needed to handle the increased load).

Keep up the good work!