Cryptome: TOR Made for US government Open Source Spying Says Maker

Why would any government create something their enemies can easily use against them, then continue funding it once they know it helps the enemy, if a government has absolutely no control over it? It's that simple.

It would seem a very bad idea. Stop looking at it from a conspiracy standpoint and consider it as a common sense question. Because it helps the government as well. An anonymity network thatonly the US government uses is fairly useless.

One that everyone uses is much more useful, and if your enemies use it as well that's very good, because then they can't cut off access without undoing their ownwork.

BINGO, we have a winner! The original *QUESTION* posed that led to the invention of Onion Routing was, "Can we build a system that allows for
bi-directional communications over the Internet where the source and destination cannot be determined by a mid-point?"

The *PURPOSE* was for DoD/Intelligence usage (open source intelligence gathering, covering of forward deployed assets, whatever). Not helping dissidents in repressive countries.

Not assisting criminals in covering their electronic tracks. Not helping bit-torrent users avoid MPAA/RIAA prosecution. Not giving a 10 year old a way to bypass an anti-porn filter.

Of course, we knew those would be other unavoidable uses for the technology, but that was immaterial to the problem at hand we were trying to solve (and if those uses were going to give us more cover traffic to better hide what we wanted to use the network for, all the better...I once told a flag officer that much to his chagrin).

I should know, I was the recipient of that question from David, and Paul was brought into the mix a few days later after I had sketched out a basic (flawed) design for the original Onion Routing.

The short answer to your question of "Why would the government do this?" is because it is in the best interests of some parts of the government to have this capability... Now enough of the conspiracy theories...

-Michael

Rightrdia believes if the US government--probably NSA--developed the Onion Network, there is probably a back door. The Onion Network could be used to undermine a statist or dictatorial government like Libya. Of course, many of these governments like Egypt are US clients, too.

Such a network could also be the outgrowth of the Ntrepid, a US government contractor software that can break into any Internet network with fake Internet personas and IP addresses to promote the US interests in the middle east, Latin, South America and other areas. 

source:

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Date: Tue, 22 Mar 2011 16:57:39 -0400
From: Michael Reed 
To: tor-talk[at]lists.torproject.org

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