Surveillance Valley

Relevant book recommendation: https://surveillancevalley.com/

As does Yasha Levine's Surveillance Valley. https://surveillancevalley.com/ And I realize anti-establishment innuendo is taboo here, but if yc is focused on bringing forth more products and services to the world, then doing so without understanding what things the world may honestly want or need, without some pretext of empathy for the source of those wants and needs, is as reprehensible as it is ineffective. When nobody today is satisfied, to the extent the richest man Bezos feels the need to upgrade his life partner, then we are not doing ourselves any justice in thinking technology can either save or replace dying virtue.

That Tor is funded by the US gov is well known, yes, but a close look at that is warranted. I have neither the time nor knowledge to judge the details for now, but claims like "passing on security reports to government contacts" (https://surveillancevalley.com/blog/claim-tor-does-not-provide-backdoo… at least look bad if the the claim is that Tor merely profits from the relationship to build the best tool possible, even if the author presents it a bit over-sensational. Let's wait what they'll extract from the documents and judge that instead of immediately claiming it as FUD.

>This is not true, and you will not be able to cite evidence that it is. https://www.salon.com/2014/11/16/googles_secret_nsa_alliance_the_terri… https://surveillancevalley.com (review: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/jan/06/surveillance-valley-by-y… >The first search result for [google disable ad targeting] is a support page linking directly to that toggle. "Labyrinthine" is not the word I would use to describe this state of affairs. Interesting, because the first result I get when I search those exact terms is a support article about how to make sure ad targeting is turned on: https://support.google.com/ads/answer/2662856?co=GENIE.Platform%3DAndr… "Control the ads you see You can make the ads you see more useful or get ads that are specific to you. You'll see Google ads on: Google services, like Search or YouTube. Websites and apps that partner with Google to show ads."

Well Bitcoin is completely unsuitable for handling transactions for many reasons (transaction time, energy consumption, just to name a few). Btw. until you are going through internet devices (routers) with your transactions government surveillance is there, so it does not solve that either. The reason why even security aware people think that cryptocurrency guys are nuts is exactly this reason, you think that you can outsmart an adversary that has unlimited resources (at least compare to you). If you look at recent developments in Australia you would understand that you cannot do anything against a government than vote the right people into power and apply pressure to politicians to end unlimited surveillance that is granted with laws like the Patriot Act. "Coupling Tor with a trusted coin tumbler, any serious criminal can hide his tracks" They absolutely cannot. Their tracks are in the the NSA database in Utah. Tor is great for one thing mark yourself suspicious so it is easier to track you down. https://surveillancevalley.com/blog/interview-in-german-magazine-konkr… https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/nzemvg/dont-just-rely-on-to… https://boingboing.net/2016/07/01/researchers-find-over-100-spyi.html TL;DR version for the inpatient "It all depends on who you are trying to protect yourself from. The biggest forces of surveillance in the world are not governments, but private…

http://yashalevine.com/articles/tor-spooks http://surveillancevalley.com/blog/fact-checking-the-tor-projects-gove…

Friendly reminder that Tor privately tips off the federal government to security vulnerabilities before alerting the public [0]. [0] http://surveillancevalley.com/blog/claim-tor-does-not-provide-backdoor…

It is built by an anarchist person who always refused to give out personal info of people to the point where his company was taken from him, and he ran away to France. He and his brother hired a ton of PhDs and made lots of paid challenges that no one could break their encryption. Their software is open sourced. The encryption Moxie Marlinspike uses was conveniently funded by the very US government agencies interested in breaking encryption. https://surveillancevalley.com/blog/government-backed-privacy-tools-ar… https://twitter.com/durov/status/872891017418113024?s=21 Or if you want just a track record of the most RECENT bugs and backdoors that were exploited, look two months ago: https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2021/01/21/bugs-video-chat-apps/ Find me the same for Telegram!

This link should explain it: https://surveillancevalley.com/blog/fact-checking-the-tor-projects-gov… The author of this book did FOIA requests to various entities but most of them got predictably shot down for national security concerns. This one obscure government agency, Broadcasting Board of Governors, wasn't covered by these exemptions. So the author read the emails between BBG and the Tor Project maintainers and found that when they received a bug report, rather than fixing it they reported it to their sponsors. The government would then exploit the bug for years before the Tor guys got around to fixing it.

Last time Tor was mentioned here, a user posted this link [1], claiming Tor is a military financed destabilization project. Seems unbelievable, but there appear to be lots of supporting documents. [1]: https://surveillancevalley.com/blog/fact-checking-the-tor-projects-gov…

"Fact-checking the Tor Project's government ties" > The Tor Project, a private non-profit that underpins the dark web and enjoys cult status among privacy activists, is almost 100% funded by the US government. https://surveillancevalley.com/blog/fact-checking-the-tor-projects-gov… https://www.documentcloud.org/public/search/projectid:37206-The-Tor-Fi…

Tor was funded by the DoD / CIA for exactly this: https://surveillancevalley.com/blog/fact-checking-the-tor-projects-gov…

He posted the FOIAd docs here: https://surveillancevalley.com/the-tor-files/master-list He and I discussed them a bit on Twitter: https://twitter.com/itdaniher/status/961307347950940161 I was not impressed by his response. The "bunch of emails" seemed remarkably banal. I've written similar emails about sponsored open-source work myself. edit: email stack 1: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4367176-Tor-BBG-correspondence… email stack 2: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4367193-Tor-BBG-correspondence…

Bingo. The CEO of Telegram likes to spread conspiracy theories that are good for business. In a recent tweet he claimed that Signal is "funded by the US government", [1] citing a ridiculous hit piece on OWS and Moxie. [2] [1] https://twitter.com/durov/status/872891017418113024 [2] https://surveillancevalley.com/blog/government-backed-privacy-tools-ar…

Yasha Levine has been promoting this view for years now. He doesn't appear to have a complete understanding of the technology he writes about, but still makes these accusations that anything the USA spends money on must be compromised. See: https://pando.com/2014/07/16/tor-spooks/ another: https://surveillancevalley.com/blog/government-backed-privacy-tools-ar… and another: https://pando.com/2015/03/01/internet-privacy-funded-by-spooks-a-brief… He brings up some good points, but then jumps to conclusions which don't actually seem reasonable.

Yasha Levine also wrote an interesting article on this: https://surveillancevalley.com/blog/on-russia-hacking-american-democra…