Top all-time · #3243
surveillancevalley.com
Personal blog · surveillancevalley.com/blogsecuritypolitics
surveillancevalley.com is a personal blog at surveillancevalley.com about security and politics. Since 2016, 24 different Hacker News readers have linked it 24 times, most often “Fact-checking the Tor Project's government ties”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Too few sampled comments (17) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Yasha Levine's surveillancevalley.com (and his Surveillance Valley book) for investigations into Tor's US government funding, FOIA-released emails and privacy-tool ties.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 17 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Fact-checking the Tor Project's government ties7 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2018-03-01
- /blog/government-backed-privacy-tools-are-not-going-to-protect-us-from-president-trump3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2017-06-12
- /3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2018-04-10
- #J20, Signal, spies and the cult of crypto2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2017-02-04
What Hacker News says?
http://yashalevine.com/articles/tor-spooks http://surveillancevalley.com/blog/fact-checking-the-tor-pro...
Comment linking /blog/fact-checking-the-tor-projects-government-ties
on “Is Tor still safe to use?”Submitted Fact-checking the Tor Project's government ties as a story · 59 points
HN discussionBingo. The CEO of Telegram likes to spread conspiracy theories that are good for business. In a recent tweet he claimed that Signal is "funded by the US government", [1] citing a ridiculous hit piece on OWS and Moxie. [2] [1] https://twitter.com/durov/status/872891017418113024 [2] https://surveillancevalley.com/blog/government-backed-privac...
Comment linking /blog/government-backed-privacy-tools-are-not-going-to-protect-us-from-president-trump
on “Telegram founder: US intelligence tried to bribe us to weaken encryption”Submitted Fact-checking the Tor Project's government ties as a story · 3 points
HN discussion"Fact-checking the Tor Project's government ties" > The Tor Project, a private non-profit that underpins the dark web and enjoys cult status among privacy activists, is almost 100% funded by the US government. https://surveillancevalley.com/blog/fact-checking-the-tor-pr... https://www.documentcloud.org/public/search/projectid:37206-...
Comment linking /blog/fact-checking-the-tor-projects-government-ties
on “VPN owners: 97 VPN products run by 23 companies”Submitted Fact-checking the Tor Project's government ties as a story · 2 points
HN discussionWell Bitcoin is completely unsuitable for handling transactions for many reasons (transaction time, energy consumption, just to name a few). Btw. until you are going through internet devices (routers) with your transactions government surveillance is there, so it does not solve that either. The reason why even security aware people think that cryptocurrency guys are nuts is exactly this reason, you think that you ca…
Comment linking /blog/interview-in-german-magazine-konkret-about-tor-and-the-cult-of-crypto
on “Grin – A private and lightweight mimblewimble blockchain”Submitted #J20, Signal, spies and the cult of crypto as a story · 2 points
HN discussionLast time Tor was mentioned here, a user posted this link [1], claiming Tor is a military financed destabilization project. Seems unbelievable, but there appear to be lots of supporting documents. [1]: https://surveillancevalley.com/blog/fact-checking-the-tor-pr...
Comment linking /blog/fact-checking-the-tor-projects-government-ties
on “Hackers breach FSB contractor, expose Tor deanonymization project”Submitted #J20, Signal, spies and the cult of crypto as a story · 2 points
HN discussionHe posted the FOIAd docs here: https://surveillancevalley.com/the-tor-files/master-list He and I discussed them a bit on Twitter: https://twitter.com/itdaniher/status/961307347950940161 I was not impressed by his response. The "bunch of emails" seemed remarkably banal. I've written similar emails about sponsored open-source work myself. edit: email stack 1: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4367176-Tor-BBG-cor…
Comment linking /the-tor-files/master-list
on “Italian Anti-Corruption Authority Adopts Onion Services”Submitted Internet was a weapon from day one as a story · 1 points
HN discussionTor was funded by the DoD / CIA for exactly this: https://surveillancevalley.com/blog/fact-checking-the-tor-pr...
Comment linking /blog/fact-checking-the-tor-projects-government-ties
on “Botched CIA Communications System Helped Blow Cover of Chinese Agents”Submitted Encryption is not journalism as a story · 1 points
HN discussionThis link should explain it: https://surveillancevalley.com/blog/fact-checking-the-tor-pr... The author of this book did FOIA requests to various entities but most of them got predictably shot down for national security concerns. This one obscure government agency, Broadcasting Board of Governors, wasn't covered by these exemptions. So the author read the emails between BBG and the Tor Project maintainers and found…
Comment linking /blog/fact-checking-the-tor-projects-government-ties
on “Second Swiss firm allegedly sold encrypted spying devices”It is built by an anarchist person who always refused to give out personal info of people to the point where his company was taken from him, and he ran away to France. He and his brother hired a ton of PhDs and made lots of paid challenges that no one could break their encryption. Their software is open sourced. The encryption Moxie Marlinspike uses was conveniently funded by the very US government agencies interest…
Comment linking /blog/government-backed-privacy-tools-are-not-going-to-protect-us-from-president-trump
on “Telegram is booming but needs advertisers and $700M soon”https://surveillancevalley.com/
Comment linking /
on “Weirdstuff Warehouse is closed”Relevant book recommendation: https://surveillancevalley.com/
Comment linking /
on “Software maker Altium rejects $3.9B takeover bid from Autodesk”As does Yasha Levine's Surveillance Valley. https://surveillancevalley.com/ And I realize anti-establishment innuendo is taboo here, but if yc is focused on bringing forth more products and services to the world, then doing so without understanding what things the world may honestly want or need, without some pretext of empathy for the source of those wants and needs, is as reprehensible as it is ineffective. When n…
Comment linking /
on “Selective Empathy Can Chip Away at Civil Society”>This is not true, and you will not be able to cite evidence that it is. https://www.salon.com/2014/11/16/googles_secret_nsa_alliance... https://surveillancevalley.com (review: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/jan/06/surveillance-v... ) >The first search result for [google disable ad targeting] is a support page linking directly to that toggle. "Labyrinthine" is not the word I would use to describe this state…
Comment linking /
on “Google faces $5B lawsuit in U.S. for tracking 'private' internet use (2020)”Yasha Levine has been promoting this view for years now. He doesn't appear to have a complete understanding of the technology he writes about, but still makes these accusations that anything the USA spends money on must be compromised. See: https://pando.com/2014/07/16/tor-spooks/ another: https://surveillancevalley.com/blog/government-backed-privac... and another: https://pando.com/2015/03/01/internet-privacy-funde…
Comment linking /blog/government-backed-privacy-tools-are-not-going-to-protect-us-from-president-trump
on “Pavel Durov: “last year we had two attempts to bribe our devs by US agencies””That Tor is funded by the US gov is well known, yes, but a close look at that is warranted. I have neither the time nor knowledge to judge the details for now, but claims like "passing on security reports to government contacts" ( https://surveillancevalley.com/blog/claim-tor-does-not-provi... ) at least look bad if the the claim is that Tor merely profits from the relationship to build the best tool possible, even…
Comment linking /blog/claim-tor-does-not-provide-backdoors-to-the-u-s-government
on “Fact-checking the Tor Project's government ties”Yasha Levine also wrote an interesting article on this: https://surveillancevalley.com/blog/on-russia-hacking-americ...
Comment linking /blog/on-russia-hacking-american-democracy
on “The Propaganda About Russian Propaganda”Friendly reminder that Tor privately tips off the federal government to security vulnerabilities before alerting the public [0]. [0] http://surveillancevalley.com/blog/claim-tor-does-not-provid...
Comment linking /blog/claim-tor-does-not-provide-backdoors-to-the-u-s-government
on “Mullvad becomes highest level of Tor Member (Shallot)”
