zippy99 @zippy99@social.privacytools.io
Cold War-era organizations spun off from the CIA now funding the global movement against government surveillance? Google and Facebook, companies that ran private surveillance networks and worked hand in hand with the NSA, deploying government-funded privacy tech to protect their users from government surveillance? Privacy activists working with Silicon Valley and the US government to fight government surveillanceāand with the support of Edward Snowden himself?
The Internet was birthed by the Pentagon. Originally called the ARPANET. the ARPANET was an offshoot of the US counterinsurgency program in Vietnam in the 1960s. And its central purpose was to facilitate that program and enable domestic surveillance efforts undertaken by the US Army and the CIA during the Vietnam War.
The Internet is a weapon, developed for counter-insurgency purposes.
The technologies touted by the so-called āPrivacy Activistsā such as Edward Snowden and Jacob Appelbaumāsuch as the Tor Internet function and the Signal mobile phone appā are readily accessible to the very intelligence services they are supposed to deflect.
The technologies touted by the so-called āPrivacy Activistsā such as Edward Snowden and Jacob Appelbaum were developed by the very intelligence services they are supposed to deflect.
Messages describe meetings, trainings, and conferences with the NSA, CIA, FBI and State Department. . . . The funding record tells the story even more precisely. . . . Tor was subsisting almost exclusively on government contracts. By 2008, that included contracts with DARPA, the Navy, the BBG, and the State Department as well as Stanford Research Instituteās Cyber-Threat Analytics program.
The Tor Project was not a radical indie organization fighting The Man. For all intents and purposes, it was The Man. Or, at least, The Manās right hand. . . . internal correspondence reveals Torās close collaboration with the BBG and multiple other wings of the US government, in particular those that dealt with foreign policy and soft-power projection.
The bulk of the BBG is no longer funded from the CIAās black budget, but the agencyās original cold War goal and purposeāsubversion and psychological operations directed against countries deemed hostile to US interestsāremain the same.
Broadcasting Board of Governors in the development of the so-called āprivacyā networks. The BBG is a CIA offshoot. The BBG might have had a bland sounding name and professed a noble mission to inform the world and spread democracy. In truth, the organization was an outgrowth of the Central Intelligence Agency.
He got help from an unexpected ally: the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which gave Tor almost a quarter million dollars to keep it going while Dingledine looked for other private sponsors. The EFF even hosted Torās website.
In 2004, Dingledine struck out on his own, spinning the military onion routing project into a non-profit corporation called the Tor Project and, while still funded by DARPA and the Navy, began scratching around for private funding.
These contracts added up to several million dollars a year and, most years, accounted for more than 90 percent of Torās operating budget. Tor was a federal military contractor. It even had its own federal contracting number. . . This included Torās founder, Roger Dingledine, who spent a summer working at the NSA and who had brought Tor to life under a series of DARPA and Navy contracts.
Tor had come out of a joint US NavyāDARPA military project in the early 2000s and continued to rely on a series of federal contracts after it was spun off into a private nonprofit. This funding came from the Pentagon, the State Department, and at least one organization that derived from the CIA.
