Tor Says Feds Paid Carnegie Mellon $1M to Help Unmask Users

Anonymous Coward

in security on 2015-11-12 21:52 (#TDNC)

"Apparently these researchers were paid by the FBI to attack hidden services users in a broad sweep, and then sift through their data to find people whom they could accuse of crimes," Dingledine writes. "Such action is a violation of our trust and basic guidelines for ethical research. We strongly support independent research on our software and network, but this attack crosses the crucial line between research and endangering innocent users."

Re: FBI denies it, FWIW (Score: 1)

by fishybell@pipedot.org on 2015-11-14 18:58 (#TKDF)

From that link:

For now, it's not clear from the FBI's statement which part is inaccurate: the specific payment amount or its involvement entirely.

So really, they're just trying to save face. It likely happened, but the news misses enough details for them to say "that exact thing you are talking about didn't happen." Considering how many of these types of things the FBI has done with impunity, I don't know why they even bother denying it. There is probably a large enough "for the children" voting bloc to keep this type of illegal activity going strong for generations to come.