

NSA and GCHQ agents 'leak Tor bugs' alleges developer - escapologybb
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-28886462

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Sanddancer
Ah, the lovely slant of the article. It's an evil tool used by pedophiles.
It's an evil tool used by drug addicts. Oh, a few activists and stuff use it,
but it's used by the terrorists hiding under your bed. The BBC logo may be
red, but the journalism is out and out yellow.

~~~
allegory
The BBC is probably one of the worst news sources there is. I'm not sure where
they got their reputation from...

Always get your news from multiple sources.

~~~
bainsfather
I find the BBC to be very good for most topics, generally better than e.g. the
Guardian or other 'broadsheet' newspapers.

BUT I have been shocked/amazed by the BBC coverage of Snowden - their silence
was often deafening. From what I have seen this last year or so, they are
definitely severely biased and/or muzzled on some topics - presumably
following pressure by the UK govt.

~~~
allegory
Yes I've noticed that. If a subject is not compatible with current government
whim, there is always silence.

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dogma1138
This whole interview and admonition is odd, and well to be completely frank
idiotic.

Lets break it down:

Option 1: This isn't true at all, at best some people leak some stuff
pretending to be members of the Intelligence community of C3/4I organisations.

Option 2: This is an NSA/GCHQ op designed to push them further from the real
exploits they use e.g. every time they feel they get close they throw them a
bone to distract them

Option 3: This is an NSA/GCHQ op designed to infiltrate the TOR community by
allowing people to gain the respect and trust of TOR's inner circle in order
to gain additional information about this project.

Option 4: These are real NSA/GCHQ employees/contractors in which case he just
might have triggered another internal witch hunt which puts his sources at
risk and puts TOR and it's members under even more scrutiny by the
Intelligence and LEO communities.

None of these scenarios have a positive outcome on neither the project or the
personal lives of the people involved and any one with a shred of common sense
would have kept their mouths shut about this.

But hey expecting common sense from these guys is not something these people
seem to be capable off lately. TOR is a great tool which is sadly used by most
of it's users for illegitimate and in many cases illegal activities. Any one
who spent some time on TOR knows that for the most part the vast majority of
the traffic although "harmless" does not originates from reporters which
working on some huge story or some people trying to bring out news out of N.
Korea. Heck TOR for the most part is unusable in countries which monitor and
sensor internet traffic since even with all the improvement made to it is
still very easy to tell when some one uses TOR and if you do it in say Iran or
N. Korea at best you should expect a prison sentence. And this is why TOR has
probably several orders of magnitude more traffic originating from some bored
dutch script kiddies who are running SQLmap on some p0rn site than from people
who should actually be protected by a system like this. If the TOR Project and
the IFF would actually accept the fact that it's not used or it's not usable
for the intended purpose and actually work on tools which will allow people
from countries that implement wide internet control and censorship(like the
UK!) to actually use them in a way that would not only be "unprovable" but
completely undetectable since lets face it proof or not if N.K. things you did
something wrong it's the same thing as you did something wrong. So yes while
TOR might be used by "activists" anyone who thinks that the majority of it's
traffic is not generated by script kiddies, criminal organisations and worse
is just fooling them selves. And while it's not an excuse to ban or kill the
project just like the fact that majority of BitTorrent traffic is compromised
of material which violates copyright laws is not an excuse to shut it down.
However the fact that TOR fails to protect and serve the users that needs it
the MOST should be something that these vanguards of "freedom and privacy"
better start looking into...

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michel-slm
Glad to see there are middle grounds for whistleblowers - they can quietly
counteract their orgs' exploitation of security vulnerabilities

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infinity0
This article is worthless; they took two sentences out of the full
interview[1] and blew it up into a whole article. The actual interview is much
better, but even then someone at the BBC couldn't resist putting a stupid
title on it.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8211566](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8211566)

------
xeroxmalf
Here[0] is the previous HN discussion of this, submitted 10 hours earlier:

[0][https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8210319](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8210319)

------
escapologybb
So, does anybody actually think this has some validity? Do we think that there
are people within the TLA's secretly helping the Tor project?

~~~
DanBC
I doubt it. I imagine the information goes one way - from the outside world
into GCHQ.

They only just (within the past few years) released work that Turing did. It's
unlikely they'd be releasing information about tor.

I'd think they'd have their own fork of tor.

Having said that, GCHQ do fund crypto research and they do have various math
collaborations so who knows.

~~~
noir_lord
The Turing stuff was officially released the implication in the article is
that the info coming from gchq is unofficial.

~~~
escapologybb
Yes, my reading of the article was that it was coming from anonymous sources.
Who knows, it could be from another couple of Snowdens or could even be
another sneaky beaky plot to degrade Tor's anonymity.

