Document claims U.S. government deliberately open‑sourced TOR in 2008 to mask intelligence use and later sought vulnerabilities

ae software had a conceptual flaw. If US intelligence services used it, the targets could figure out that anyone visiting a site without an IP address was using TOR software to hide it. If TOR was exclusive used by US intelligence services, the targets could further deduce that all the anonymous visitors were avatars for American intelligence. It would be analogous to undercover police using pink-color cars that civilians did not use. To remedy this flaw, the US government in 2008 made TOR software open-source and freely available to everyone in the world. It even provided funding for its promulgation with the State Department, the National Science Foundation, and the Broadcasting Board of Governors financing TOR’s core developer. The public rationale for this generosity was that TOR could serve as a tool for, as the State Department called it, “democracy advocates in authoritarian states." The result was TOR software became a tool of both intelligence services and their adversaries. As TOR software became widely used by adversaries (as well as common criminals), the NSA sought to find vulnerabilities in it. “It should hardly be surprising that our intelligence agencies seek ways to counteract targets’ that use TOR software to hide their communications, explained a NSA spokesperson. The NSA’s adversaries also took an interest in identifying TOR users. TOR software also took on a cult-like importance to hacktavists concerned with the US government tracking their activities. An illuminating insight into the mind-set of the TOR hacktavists is provided by Catherine A. Fitzpatrick in her 2013 book Privacy For Me Not For Thee. She describes these hacktavists as largely “radical anarchists,” who believe “the state is all- powerful, that law-enforcement is so strong that it will prevail anyway, and that they are a persecuted minority.” As a refuge against the surveillance of the state, and in particular the NSA, they not only hide attempt to their own identity nut use encryption to obscure their messages. Their goal is free their movements from “of any interference from law-enforcement.” In this mind- set, according to Fitzpatrick, “They believe government intelligence agencies will stop at nothing to stop them from absolute encryption.” TOR software was a means to defeat the NSA, but to be successfully there needed to be such a proliferation of TOR servers that the NSA could not piece together IP addresses. The problem was that in 2012 the TOR project, as they called it, was still a very tiny operation in 2012. It employed less than 100 core developers who were located mainly in Germany, Iceland, Japan, Estonia, and the United States. Its staff worked mainly out of a single room in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The guiding spirit behind the TOR movement was Jacob Appelbaum, a charismatic 28-year old who had grown up in northern California. Like Snowden, he had dropped out of high school. Appelbaum identified himself to his followers on the Internet as a “hacktivist” battling state surveillance. For him, as with many in the hacktavist culture, the main enemy was the NSA. After all, the NSA had a vast army of computer scientists working to unravel TOR software. HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_020224