and more!
pando.com/2014/11/14/tor-smear/
"Perhaps it’s somewhat understandable that salaried Tor
developers like Andrea Shepard and Jacob Appelbaum went on the
attack......Both Appelbaum and Shepard circulate in radical
anti-police state circles, and my article pointed out that they
earn $100,000-plus annual salaries working for a nonprofit
federal government security contractor—a nonprofit that gets at
least three-quarters of its annual funding from the Pentagon,
State Department, and other federal agencies. In other words,
Tor anti-National Security State rebels are living off the
largesse of their NatSec State nemesis."
"Morgan Marquis-Boire, a former Googler who was recently
poached by Pierre Omidyar to run security at First Look, called
me a loony conspiracy theorist for reporting on Tor’s
government funding—but then contradicted himself by arguing
that this “conspiracy theory” is a matter of public record. It
was a baffling, oxymoronic argument to make—accusing my article
of being both a wild conspiracy theory, yet also boring old
news that no one should bother reading—but for some reason, Tor
defenders thought this self-contradiction made perfect logical
sense:"
"As it turned out, Halpin, like the Tor developers and their
defenders, had other reasons to try to discredit reporting on
funding and conflicts-of-interest. Halpin is the president of
LEAP, a small privacy/encryption outfit that gets most of its
funding from various government sources—including more than $1
million from Radio Free Asia’s “Open Technology Fund.” This
fund just happens to be a major financial backer of the Tor
Network; last year alone, the Open Technology Fund gave Tor
$600,000. The fund also happens to be run out of the
Broadcasters Board of Governors (BBG), an old CIA spinoff
dedicated to waging propaganda warfare against regimes hostile
to US interests. The BBG—which until recently was called the
International Broadcasting Bureau—has also been one of the
biggest backers of Tor going back to 2007."
"No wonder all these people are so upset by my reporting.
They’ve branded themselves as radical activists fighting The
Man and the corporate surveillance apparatus—while taking money
from the US government’s military and foreign policy arms, as
well as the biggest and worst corporate violators of our
privacy. By branding themselves as radical activists, they
appear to share the same interests as the grassroots they seek
to influence; exposing their funding conflicts-of-interests
makes it hard for them to pose as grassroots radicals. So
instead of explaining why getting funding from the very
entitities that Tor is supposed to protect users from is not a
problem, they’ve taken the low road to discredit the very idea
of reporting on monetary conflicts-of-interests as either
irrelevant, or worse, a sign of mental illness."
