This is What a Tor Supporter Looks Like: Shari Steele

hmm...i saw yet hundreds of citizens wearing anti-surveillance clothing (anonymous party) and they went in jail ... or almost ...
this 'surveillance' state will continue as long as usa will go outside their frontiers so ... us go home !
the future is dark, you will not have enough citizens for 'bypassing the internet entirely'

Terrific interview of Shari by Cyrus Farivar in Ars Technica:

http://arstechnica.com/security/2016/01/going-forward-the-tor-project-w…
Two months after FBI debacle, Tor Project still can’t get an answer from CMU
Ars Q&A: We sit down with Tor Project's new executive director, Shari Steele.
Cyrus Farivar
10 Jan 2016

> The two biggest things I want to work on: First is to build up an infrastructure and second is to build up the reputation of the organization and bring in money from alternative sources. A significant amount of the money right now is coming from various US government grants. That's great that there's money coming in, but most of that is restricted money, and you have to work on the specific things that are talked about in the proposal and the grant issuance. So we're looking to find some additional funding sources. There's a big crowdfunding going on right now to get individual donations.

Totally agree. I greatly hope that the funding drive is a big success.

> As someone who has observed Tor for years and years from the outside, it's actually kind of mind-blowing, the difference between what the project is actually about, the service, and how essential it is to the infrastructure of freedom versus the public's reaction to it is and how it has been received in papers. That really is one of the things that I'm hoping to change.

Hear! Hear!

> There's a sort of fantasy—how will Tor grow, what would that look like if we had unlimited resources, and how would we make that more accessible—and the fantasy is that maybe someday it's built-in to a privacy option on regular apps that you use. You wouldn't normally have it turned on, and instead when you do your Google search, you would click a switch and say “I would like to browse privately now”—that would be Tor. That's kind of the way we're thinking about it.

Excellent. Sometimes when big positive changes happen, they happens very quickly.

> CMU isn't talking to Tor. Tor isn't getting the actual facts of what happened... Clearly CMU takes federal money in order to do research that is attacking Tor, and Tor knows about that. So how deeply was CMU involved? Whether CMU actually did the searches for the FBI, or provided the FBI with the vulnerability, we don't know the details.... [CMU and Tor Project] always used to talk to each other. With this particular event, CMU is not talking to Tor. Tor has tried on multiple occasions, particularly when the abstract for the paper first got published, to find out, 'what's the vulnerability, let's get it plugged!' But CMU, they are not talking. Obviously there are individuals at CMU who are friends of ours that we still talk to, but the researchers who are involved in this have not been returning our phone calls.... And this is a little bit of a concern that this is going to affect CERT, because that comes out of CMU... It's very frustrating because CMU is a friend, they should be a friend, we're all working in the same space and we should be all working together. It's very frustrating that our friends are actually attacking the network.

With friends like that, who needs enemies?

> But we now have some serious things in place to pay attention to when a bunch of new nodes are all showing up from the same location or from something similar. It could be disguised if we didn't identify when all the new nodes are coming from the same place, but there are alarms now that go off. In fact, the CMU stuff, they saw the new nodes coming on and it didn't see it as a threat at the time. Now it gets elevated to threat level. So today, hopefully we'll be able to catch at least that vulnerability. It's a cat and mouse game where we're constantly going to have to be vigilant about that.

Exactly. It's an arms race. It is actually a huge positive step that the Project has recognized (thanks to people like Jacob Appelbaum, who published a snippet of NSA source code proving that the agency is attacking Directory Authorities) that the USG, or at least parts of the USG, cannot possibly be regarded as a friend of Tor, or indeed as a friend of freedom.

> the State Department wants Tor for activists and people living in repressive regimes. And then you have another arm of the US government that's actively trying to break it, actively trying to surveil it, actively trying to infiltrate it, and do all kinds of nefarious things. So you have different arms of the government fighting each other. Not even necessarily different arms, but within the State Department there is offensive and defensive. The same branch of the government can be both trying to defend the network and trying to go out there and attack other people. Yeah, it's pretty psychotic, actually.

One recalls the curious case of a US arson investigator who had won numerous awards for his investigations of numerous arsons. It turned out that the arsonist was the investigator himself. One recalls also the case of a forensic science consultant who had won high praise for her role in convicting many persons in high profile murder cases. It turned out she had been faking all the evidence, which led to an enormously expensive [but cooked] review of all those convictions, because the verdicts had been based upon false evidence. One recalls the case of the highly regarded DEA agent who arrested a money laundering suspect who had been using Bitcoin for shady transactions. It later turned out that agent (and a Secret Service colleague) had been themselves using Bitcoin for illegal transactions, and had even tipped off their main suspect.

One recalls the case of the highly regarded FBI cybersecurity expert who had stoutly defended FBI against those who insisted the agency had a "mole" who was tipping off foreign espionage agencies to FBI investigations. It turned out the mole was the highly regarded FBI agent. One recalls the case of the highly regarded CIA analyst...

But you get the idea: a large portion of the US federal government has broken bad.

The default in the Tor Project (and indeed in US academia) has been that US government agencies (and their employees) are trustworthy until proven otherwise. I believe it is a very good thing that the default is becoming: these people must be regarded as untrustworthy, even as adversaries, until they prove otherwise. (For example by risking their careers/freedom by helping us to make Tor better by informing us about USG zerodays affecting Tor-using products.)