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Tor hires former EFF chief as executive director

pcworld.com

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Re: Tor hires former EFF chief as executive director

#11

Post by conradev »

adrtessier wrote: post #10
sandworm101 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only problem I see with hiring an attorney is that being such could be a weakness. An attorney is bound by some rules normal people are not. It is a bigger ask for an attorney defying a court order than for a normal person without a law license to be yanked. Tor is a tricky beast. One can see a day where those in charge may have to take drastic actions (think lavabit). Perhaps a non-US person, or cross-boarder te…

If that's the case, Roger Dingledine is probably the one that should become a non-US person, given he is still leading the technical side of things from what I can see. He could be NSL'd just the same. At the end of the day, Tor is an American project, and still has to play to some extent by American rules. Doing that above board is really all they have.

Nick Mathewson is the one who leads development on `tor`, to my knowledge.

Re: Tor hires former EFF chief as executive director

#12

Post by conradev »

dguido wrote: post #3
adrtessier wrote: post #2

It is hard for me to come up with a better strategy for a Tor executive director, than to hire someone who is both a proven electronic civil liberties activist and a competent attorney to lead a project that has already been feeling the heat. Unfortunately, Tor likely will be publicly thrown to the angry mob by an ignorant representative the moment it is politically expedient and be seared on the grill of neocon pund…

> already been feeling the heat I think you're misdiagnosing where Tor is "feeling the heat" from. From an engineering perspective, it's been oversold as solving problems it can never hope to. People who route their traffic through Tor are nearly guaranteed to get malware back [1]. Hidden Services are a hack that don't adequately protect your privacy [2]. And several who have staked their livelihood on being anonymou…

First, I would like to separate the little-t tor from big-T Tor for a second. I had the privilege of attending the most recent dev meeting and found the Tor Project to be an incredible group of people who are dedicated to a single mission[1].

Besides working on `tor`, members of the Tor project are also working on better censorship resistance[2], reproducible builds[3], and improving Firefox[4], among other efforts. To me, a motivated corps of technologists that have the resources to work on projects to protect user privacy can do anything under the right leadership.

> oversold as solving problems it can never hope to

If onion routing can't solve the problem of masking your location on the internet (thus providing greater anonymity) then what can? Right now I see it as the only practical solution for doing so. I also don't see any of the problems you listed as fundamental issues. Hidden services are fairly new, for example, and a new spec is being actively worked on.

I understand that it is sometimes billed as a panacea of sorts, but I feel that the Tor Project is honest with itself and its users about the protection that `tor` provides[5].

[1] https://twitter.com/torproject/status/635856569201246208

[2] https://github.com/Yawning/obfs4

[3] https://reproducible-builds.org

[4] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1rF4Gah_OEequYDfPedoQ...

[5] https://blog.torproject.org/blog/nine-questions-about-hidden...

Re: Tor hires former EFF chief as executive director

#14

Post by xorcist »

dguido wrote: post #3
adrtessier wrote: post #2

It is hard for me to come up with a better strategy for a Tor executive director, than to hire someone who is both a proven electronic civil liberties activist and a competent attorney to lead a project that has already been feeling the heat. Unfortunately, Tor likely will be publicly thrown to the angry mob by an ignorant representative the moment it is politically expedient and be seared on the grill of neocon pund…

> already been feeling the heat I think you're misdiagnosing where Tor is "feeling the heat" from. From an engineering perspective, it's been oversold as solving problems it can never hope to. People who route their traffic through Tor are nearly guaranteed to get malware back [1]. Hidden Services are a hack that don't adequately protect your privacy [2]. And several who have staked their livelihood on being anonymou…

Parts of Tor is a research project, but that makes it all the more important. It's not like anonymity is a solved problem.

Hidden Services is not a concept that originated with tor, but it operates at a scale no one has before, and as new problems surface and as adversaries scale up there are new things to learn from it. I wish more people could have the opportunity to do so.

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