Surveillance Valley

by Yasha Levine

  3. Roger Dingledine, Jacob Appelbaum, and Laura Poitras, “State of the Onion,” 31c3, December 30, 2014, https://media.ccc.de/v/31c3_-_6251_-_en_-_saal_1_-_201412301400_-_state_of_the_onion_-_jacob_-_arma.

  4. Roger Dingledine, Jacob Appelbaum, Mike Perry, Shari Steele, and Alison Macrina, “State of the Onion,” 32c3, December 28, 2015, https://media.ccc.de/v/32c3-7307-state_of_the_onion#video.

  5. Nicole Perlroth, “Tor Project Confirms Sexual Misconduct Claims against Employee,” New York Times, July 27, 2016.

  6. Jacob Appelbaum’s most recent salary information comes from a separation agreement Tor Project sent to him following the sexual harassment allegations, a document that was subsequently leaked to Cryptome.org. “Tor/Appelbaum Separation Agreement,” Cryptome, June 8, 2016, http://web.archive.org/web/20170521125929/https://cryptome.org/2016/06/tor-appelbaum-separation.pdf.

  7. From 2007 through 2015, the Tor Project received roughly $6.1 million from the Broadcasting Board of Governors. Yasha Levine, “Notes on Tor Project Funding—Broadcasting Board of Governors,” Surveillance Valley, May 2, 2017, https://surveillancevalley.com/blog/notes-bbg-cia-cutout-funding-of-tor-project.

  8. Jacob Appelbaum gave a strange rambling defense of Tor employees taking money from the Pentagon and said categorically that he would never take CIA money. That’s where he drew the line. Interestingly, as information presented later in this chapter reveals, Tor gets the bulk of its funding from organizations created by the CIA. “I think it sucks that we take Department of Defense money sometimes,” Appelbaum said in December 2014. “And sometimes I think it’s good when people have the ability to feed themselves and have the ability to have a home and a family. Now, I don’t have those things, really. I mean, I can feed myself. But I don’t have a home or a family in the same way, say, the family people inside of Tor do. And they need to be paid. It is the case that is true. And it raises questions. I personally would never take CIA money, and I don’t think nobody should. I don’t think the CIA should exist.” Dingledine, Appelbaum, and Poitras, “State of the Onion.”

  9. “People have approached us to do these types of things, and this is a serious commitment that the whole Tor community gets behind, which is that we will never ever put in a backdoor,” Jacob Appelbaum said in a 2013 talk, relating a story about how the Department of Justice once tried but failed to get Tor to tap the network for the federal government. Roger Dingledine and Jacob Appelbaum, “The Tor Network: We’re Living in Interesting Times,” 30c3, December 31, 2013, https://media.ccc.de/v/30C3_-_5423_-_en_-_saal_1_-_201312272030_-_the_tor_network_-_jacob_-_arma#video&t=0.

  10. Paul Syverson, homepage, accessed February 9, 2016, http://www.syverson.org/.

  11. Michael Kirk, “Cyberwar!” Frontline (Alexandria, VA: PBS, April 24, 2003), short film.

  12. Paul Syverson wrote the NRL Review article along with two other cocreators of onion routing, David Goldschlag and Michael Reed, mathematicians and computer systems researchers working for the US Navy. NRL Review was an in-house navy magazine that showcased all the cool gadgets cooked up by the lab over the previous year. D. M. Goldschlag, M. G. Reed, and P. F. Syverson, “Internet Communication Resistant to Traffic Analysis,” NRL Review, April 1997.

  13. This last stage of development was funded by both the Office of Naval Research and DARPA under its Fault Tolerant Networks Program. The amount of the DARPA funding is unknown. “Onion Routing: Brief Selected History,” website formerly operated by the Center for High Assurance Computer Systems in the Information Technology Division of the US Naval Research Lab, 2005, accessed July 6, 2017, https://www.onion-router.net/History.html.

  14. Paul Syverson, email message sent to [tor-talk], “Iran cracks down on web dissident technology,” Tor Project, March 21, 2011, http://web.archive.org/web/20170521144023/https:/lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-talk/2011-March/019868.html.

  15. Roger Dingledine, “Tor: An Anonymous Internet Communication System” (presentation made at Panopticon, the 15th Annual Conference on Computers, Freedom & Privacy, Keeping an Eye on the Panopticon: Workshop on Vanishing Anonymity, Seattle, April 12, 2005).

  16. Tor was originally an acronym written as TOR, for “The Onion Router,” but today just the word “Tor” is used.

  17. Roger Dingledine, “Free Privacy Enhancing Technologies” (presentation made at Wizards of OS conference, Germany, June 11, 2004).

  18. Funding from DARPA and the Naval Research Laboratory continued through 2004. The navy contract was somewhere around $250,000 a year, according to emails between Roger Dingledine and the Broadcasting Board of Governors. “Onion Routing: Brief Selected History,” https://www.onion-router.net/History.html.

  19. “We funded Roger Dingledine and Nick Mathewson to work on Tor for a single year from November 2004 through October 2005 for $180,000. We then served as a fiscal sponsor for the project until they got their 501(c)(3) status over the next year or two. During that time, we took in less than $50,000 for the project,” EFF’s Dave Maass told me by email.

  20. Dingledine, “Tor: An Anonymous Internet Communication System.”

  21. “EFF Joins Forces with Tor Software Project,” press release, Electronic Frontier Foundation, December 21, 2004, https://www.eff.org/press/archives/2004/12/21–0.

  22. Wired magazine called it the “let’s-just-wiretap-everyone” bill. Rogier van Bakel, “How Good People Helped Make a Bad Law,” Wired, February 1, 1999.

  23. “Anonymizer.com Launches Kosovo Privacy Project to Protect Online communication in Yugoslavia and Kosovo,” press release, Anonymizer, March 26, 1999. EFF partnered with Anonymizer Inc., an early Tor-like commercial anonymous Internet browsing service started by Lance Contrell, a cypherpunk and computer engineer. The Kosovo Privacy Project Anonymizer would go on to do a lot of military and intelligence work, providing Tor-like custom solutions, including anonymous browsing tools and what is known as persona-management software. It is now owned by Ntrepid, which, among other things, in 2011 signed a $2.76 million contract with the Pentagon to provide anonymous/persona-management software (Nick Fielding and Ian Cobain, “Revealed: US Spy Operation That Manipulates Social Media,” Guardian, March 17, 2011). Discussion on Anonymizer’s intelligence work comes from leaked emails of another intelligence contractor, HBGary, which was hacked by Anonymous (Aaron Barr, “Re: this guy’s program is blown?” email message, July 1, 2010, https://surveillancevalley.com/content/citations/aaron-barr-aaron%40hbgary.com-re-this-guy-s-program-is-blown-1-july-2010.pdf).

  24. John Perry Barlow, “Why Spy?” Forbes.com, October 7, 2002, https://www.forbes.com/asap/2002/1007/042.html.

  25. A 2005 Wired profile of Tor and Roger Dingledine written by Kim Zetter offered a perfect example of how Tor’s military origins and funding were treated in those early years. Although the article discussed Tor’s origins as a US Navy project designed to hide spies online, it made no mention of Tor’s ongoing military funding and painted Dingledine and his partner Mathewson as independent programmers who had taken a half-baked technology, rebuilt it independently, and released it into the wild. “Tor has been completely rebuilt since the Navy initially designed it in the late’ 90s. The EFF has thrown its support behind the project, and its creators are now hopeful they will be able to add servers and attract new users, thus bolstering the system’s privacy and security benefits,” she wrote. Kim Zetter, “Tor Torches Online Tracking,” Wired, May 17, 2005.

  26. Ken Berman, email message sent to Roger Dingledine, “A roadmap for Tor + IBB,” February 8, 2006, https://surveillancevalley.com/content/citations/a-road map-for-tor-ibb-february-08–2006.pdf. All emails between the BBG and employees of the Tor Project quoted in this chapter are taken from documents I obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.

  27. Pete Payne, “Tor Protects Anonymous Sources,” Network Computing, February 5, 2007, http://archive.is/WF1nv.

  28. Yasha Levine, “Notes on Tor Project Funding—State Department,” Surveillance Valley (blog), March 17, 201
5, https://surveillancevalley.com/blog /state-department-funding-tor-project; Yasha Levine, “Notes on Tor Project Funding—The Pentagon,” Surveillance Valley (blog), March 2, 2015, https:// surveillancevalley.com/blog/notes-on-pentagon-funding-of-the-tor-project; Yasha Levine, “Notes on Tor Project Funding—Broadcasting Board of Governors,” Surveillance Valley (blog), May 2, 2017, https://surveillancevalley.com/blog /notes-bbg-cia-cutout-funding-of-tor-project.

  29. A note on word and acronym usage: in the Tor-BBG emails, people sometimes use “International Broadcasting Bureau” or “IBB”—a wing of the BBG—to refer to the BGG. I chose to standardize these references to simply “BBG” or “Broadcasting Board of Governors” for clarity.

  30. Ken Berman, email message sent to Roger Dingledine, “Tor + IBB: moving forward,” February 24, 2006, https://surveillancevalley.com/content/citations /tor-ibb-moving-forward-24-february-2006-bbg-tor-emails-stack-7.pdf.

  31. Bennett Haselton, email message sent to Roger Dingledine, “Re: Tor + IBB: moving forward,” March 1, 2006, https://surveillancevalley.com/content/citations/email-from-bennett-haselton-to-roger-dingledine-re-tor-ibb-moving-forward-1-march-2006-bbg-tor-emails-stack-7.pdf.

  32. Christopher Simpson, Blowback: America’s Recruitment of Nazis and Its Destructive Impact on Our Domestic and Foreign Policy (New York: Open Road Media, 2014), chap. 7, “The thinking behind this strategy was perhaps best articulated by George F. Kennan, the State Department expert on Soviet affairs…”

  33. John Lewis Gaddis, George F. Kennan: An American Life (New York: Penguin Press, 2011).

  34. “The National Security Council, taking cognizance of the vicious covert activities of the USSR, its satellite countries and Communist groups to discredit and defeat the aims and activities of the United States and other Western powers, has determined that, in the interests of world peace and US national security, the overt foreign activities of the US Government must be supplemented by covert operations. The Central Intelligence Agency is charged by the National Security Council with conducting espionage and counter-espionage operations abroad. It therefore seems desirable, for operational reasons, not to create a new agency for covert operations, but in time of peace to place the responsibility for them within the structure of the Central Intelligence Agency and correlate them with espionage and counter-espionage operations under the over-all control of the Director of Central Intelligence,” reads a portion of the directive. “292. National Security Council Directive on Office of Special Projects: NSC 10/2,” State Department, Office of the Historian, June 18, 1948, https://web.archive.org/web/20170521183859/https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1945-50Intel/d292.

  35. Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (New York: New Press, 2000); Simpson, Blowback, chap. 10, “CIA-funded psychological warfare projects employing Eastern European émigrés became major operations during the 1950s …”

  36. The US Senate’s Church Committee’s most thorough investigation of covert operations by American intelligence agencies found that the CIA targeted every segment of society in both Western and Eastern Europe. “This included underwriting most of the French Paix et Liberté movement, paying the bills of the German League for Struggle Against Inhumanity, and financing a half dozen free jurists associations, a variety of European federalist groups, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, magazines, news services, book publishers, and much more,” writes historian Christopher Simpson in Blowback (chap. 10). Ralph McGehee, a former CIA agent who wrote about his experiences in Deadly Deceits, described this effort as more than just rolling back Soviet influence in specific countries. It was an attempt to fight ideas with ideas. “Within the Agency the international organizations division was coordinating an extensive propaganda effort aimed at developing an international anti-communist ideology.” Ralph W. McGehee, Deadly Deceits: My 25 Years in the CIA (New York: Sheridan Square Press, 1983).

  37. Victor Marchetti and John D. Marks, The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974); Gene Sosin, Sparks of Liberty: An Insider’s Memoir of Radio Liberty (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1999). “The facade of a private company was supposed to establish greater credibility for the Radio as an independent voice rather than an official arm of the U.S. communications network,” Gene Sosin, a longtime executive of Radio Liberty who worked for military intelligence during World War II, explains in his memoir. “Thus, when Soviet diplomats confronted their American counterparts at international conferences with the accusation that the émigré radio was ‘interfering with the internal affairs of the Soviet people,’ they were simply informed that it was a private radio station not subject to government control,” writes Sosin in Sparks of Liberty. Of course, the CIA wasn’t fooling the Soviet government, which had spies crawling all over Europe. More than anything else, the front was meant to hide government involvement from the American people themselves and to keep them in the dark. The public had no idea these radio stations were CIA projects, and they frequently managed to snare unwitting guests and use them for propaganda purposes—even Martin Luther King Jr. was a guest on the CIA’s Radio Liberty news programs. The radio stations were also used as fronts and bases of operation for all sorts of other covert activities. The radio stations themselves—and their antennas—were used as platforms for surveillance and signals intelligence.

  38. Simpson, Blowback, chap. 10, “RFE/RL recruiters wanted to re-create these governments-in-exile for propaganda use against the USSR … “

  39. “Worldwide Propaganda Network Built by the C.I.A.,” New York Times, December 26, 1977. Part of the program included training Chinese journalists at Harvard, according to the New York Times.

  40. In Latin America, the CIA broadcast through Radio Free Cuba, Radio Swan, and Radio Americas. Some of the stations employed Cuban exiles who had taken part in the failed Bay of Pigs invasion (Joseph B. Treaster, “Cuba Enlivens Radio as U.S. Prepares a Challenge,” New York Times, August 5, 1984). Indeed, radio programming was frequently used to back up military operations against target countries. The Bay of Pigs was preceded and backed up by propaganda broadcasts calling on Cubans to rise up and overthrow their government. The CIA-backed coup in Guatemala was aided by radio broadcasts, as well, according to Tim Weiner’s history of the CIA, Legacy of Ashes. “For four weeks, starting on May Day 1954, the CIA had been waging psychological warfare in Guatemala through a pirate radio station called the Voice of Liberation, run by a CIA contract officer, an amateur actor and skilled dramatist named David Atlee Phillips. In a tremendous stroke of luck, the Guatemalan state radio station went off the air in mid-May for a scheduled replacement of its antenna. Phillips snuggled up to its frequency, where listeners looking for the state broadcasts found Radio CIA. Unrest turned to hysteria among the populace as the rebel station sent out shortwave reports of imaginary uprisings and defections and plots to poison wells and conscript children” (Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA [New York: Doubleday, 2007]). These same tactics were later used in Southeast Asia to back up American military operations in Korea and Vietnam.

  41. “A Look Back, the National Committee for Free Europe, 1949,” Central Intelligence Agency, May 29, 2007, https://www.cia.gov/news-information/featured-story-archive/2007-featured-story-archive/a-look-back.html.

  42. Stephen Kotkin, “Sphere of Influence II: What, If Anything, Is the Difference between Fascism and Communism?” IVM Lectures in Human Sciences, Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen, April 19, 2017, http://www.iwm.at/events /event/sphere-of-influence-ii/.

  43. “In the Pay of the CIA,” CBS News, March 13, 1967, https://surveillance valley.com/content/citations/in-the-pay-of-the-cia-cbs-news-13-march-1967-4-of-5.mp4.

  44. Every year the BBG releases a world map with regions and countries where it operates shaded in red—and most of the world is a giant crimson blob: Radio Martí (aimed at Cuba), Radio Farda (aimed at Iran), Radio Sawa (which broadcasts in Iraq,
Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, and Sudan), Radio Azadi (targeting Afghanistan), Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (which has tailored broadcasts in over a dozen languages for Russia, Ukraine, Serbia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, and Armenia), and Radio Free Asia (which targets China, North Korea, Laos, and Vietnam). RadioFreeEurope/Radio Liberty coverage map, http://web.archive.org/web/20170301215817/http://flashvideo.rferl.org/Flashmapsnew/maps.swf.

  45. Nor did the BBG cut ties to the same military and intelligence agencies that supported and sustained it during the Cold War. The National Endowment for Democracy, Freedom House, DARPA, the State Department, and USAID continued to be BBG’s close partners. Today, the BBG runs on a $750 million budget provided by Congress, reports to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, and is managed by a revolving crew of media executives and neoconservative think-tank experts handpicked by the Trump administration. Several sources who work at the BBG tell me that the organization still has spies working under journalistic cover.

  46. “Memorandum For: Special Assistant to the President, Subject: International Radio Broadcasting by Radio Free Asia,” Central Intelligence Agency, April 1, 1953, https://surveillancevalley.com/content/citations/memorandum-for-special-assistant-to-the-president-subject-international-radio-broadcasting-by-radio freeasia-cia-1-april-1953.pdf. The United States played a double game with China. It was America’s largest trading partner. American companies had eagerly transported their production technology and capacity to China, gutting American manufacturing in pursuit of cheap labor abroad. While American business benefited from China’s cheap labor and large market for goods and entertainment, the US government also saw China as a potential adversary that needed to be kept in check.

  47. “China’s Control of News and Information May Have Worsened SARS Epidemic, Broadcasters Say,” Broadcasting Board of Governors, June 5, 2003, https://www.bbg.gov/2003/06/05/chinas-control-of-news-and-information-may-have-worsened-sars-epidemic-broadcasters-say/.