I've heard a lot of people on the left argue that Tor is likely backdoored because it was created by the U.S. Navy for spies to communicate and is still funded by the government. Yasha Levine has written a lot about this:
- https://surveillancevalley.com/blog/tor-files
- https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-crypto-keepers-levine
He also appeared in TrueAnon episode 50 to talk about this.
On the other hand, a lot of people in the crypto and tech community disagree with this. They believe that Tor is not backdoored for one or both of the following reasons:
- Tor is open-source and has been audited.
- The U.S. Government would never do such a thing.
They also point to a leaked NSA presentation from 2007 that admits the NSA can't deanonymize Tor users.
What are your thoughts?
I've never met a cryptologist who isn't convinced everything needs to be perfect and impenetrable because the US government could go rogue at any second. Including several who work at the NSA lol.
Yeah I do cryptography research and this is the opinion of everyone I've worked with. For example everyone is convinced that NSA broke some of the curves used in eclipitic curve crypto so no one will use them and people are constantly obsessing over finding new curves.