I stumbled across this video and was curious if anyone had thoughts or responses.
It’s an 80-minute comedic video essay tracing us military/cybernetic influence in the origins of Tor, and critically assessing it’s digital security consequences.
The video grants that Tor offers free increased access to information and limited improved privacy, and notes Tor also cannot claim to be a robust defense against surveillance, and perhaps it receives government funding in part because advocating it’s use is a distraction from the demand for abolition of surveillance.
Absurdly, the video also includes an ad for a for profit vpn service.
I didn’t listen to the whole thing but I have heard many of these arguments before - and they are all correct:
The Tor project was started by libertarians with questionable politics
They have received a lot of government funding
Their interests have been aligned with USAID
It’s not a perfect form defense against surveillance
A lot of criminal and sketchy people use it
I think all these things can be true and also I think the Tor project plays an important role in the over all movement for tech privacy. I personally know some of the people working for the Tor project and am confident nobody actively involved in the project is doing anything sketchy. And I don’t think the Tor project detracts for the demand for the abolition of surveillance.
I do think journalism like this is super fascinating. In particular, all the ways left movements fall in and out of alignment with the old USAID objectives is wild. Basically, if you happen to be working a project that could support a democratic movement in a country that happens to be in opposition to the US - you can get some money! That really applies to most privacy/security related tech tools (many of which are used in legit human rights campaigns in countries opposed to the US and have received US Government support).
May First had a board meeting back before the first Trump administration where we decided we would not apply for US government funding because the optics are bad. Ultimately, I think this video is all about optics - and yes, the optics do look bad for Tor - but I think it’s just optics.
So yes, the story of creepy government spooks doing weird shit is endlessly entertaining - which I’m sure is why this guy is on to it. But, as you point out, the absurd break for the Proton VPN kinda ruins the legitimacy of the critique. I mean really? I am glad Proton mail is around, but I would trust the Tor project way before I would trust Proton!!
jamie summed it up pretty well. I stopped watching about an hour in when the topic had changed from about whether Tor is effective to talking about communal living, Nazis and cybernetics.
Some details that I feel the author got wrong is that the cypherpunks wanted secrecy. They wanted (and still want) privacy. The second sentence of the cypherpunk manifesto is literally “Privacy is not secrecy.”
He also implied that there was no point in using Tor to log into Facebook’s onion site, or any other website for that matter. Again, I disagree. Tor doesn’t magically protect you from all threats, but it will still hide you IP address, which hides your location from Facebook. If you’re using a pseudonym, this is extremely useful because facebook probably has a pretty good mapping of IP addresses to people’s names and addresses at this point, and I suspect anyone who is willing to pay data brokers do as well. It also hides the fact that you’re connecting to Facebook from your Internet Service Provider.
But ignoring nuance and speaking absolutes makes for a more popular video, which gets the author more money… so, yeah
