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

by
Anonymous Coward
in security on (#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."
Reply 4 comments

News (Score: 1)

by fishybell@pipedot.org on 2015-11-13 18:03 (#TGG6)

This has been sitting here for roughly a day with no comments. I can only presume it's because everyone is becoming desensitized to this type of news. "Government Overreach," "Warrant-less Searches," "FBI Hates Tor," are all headlines that just feel like the new norm.

Re: News (Score: 0)

by Anonymous Coward on 2015-11-13 20:10 (#TGV0)

I ran out of words about this kind of thing, and even though I'm from a different country, I'm angry as hell about it.

FBI denies it, FWIW (Score: 0)

by Anonymous Coward on 2015-11-13 22:14 (#TH4Y)

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/11/fbi-the-allegation-that-we-paid-cmu-1m-to-hack-into-tor-is-inaccurate/

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.