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by Yasha Levine


  48. Thomas Lum, Patricia Moloney Figliola, and Matthew C. Weed, China, Internet Freedom, and U.S. Policy (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, July 13, 2012), https://fas.org/sgp/crs/row/R42601.pdf.

  49. “Statement of the Broadcasting Board of Governors Before the Congressional-Executive Commission on China: China’s Jamming of U.S. International Broadcasting,” press release, Broadcasting Board of Governors, December 9, 2002, https://www.bbg.gov/2002/12/09/statement-of-the-broadcasting-board-of-governors-before-the-congressional-executive-commission-on-china/.

  50. In 2006, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice set up the Global Internet Freedom Task Force (GIFT), a top-level “coordination group” that was supposed to “address challenges around the globe to freedom of expression and the free flow of information on the Internet” but instead seemed geared to helping US Internet companies assess business risks in emerging markets.

  51. As Shawn Powers and Michael Jablonski write in The Real Cyberwar: “Geopolitics often comes veiled in ideological language, at least initially. The State Department’s evolving doctrine of internet freedom, most clearly articulated by Secretary Clinton, is the realization of a broader strategy promoting a particular conception of networked communication that depends on American companies (for example, Amazon, AT&T, Facebook, Google, and Level 3), supports Western norms (such as copyright, advertising-based consumerism, and the like), and promotes Western products.… internet policies reflect strategic pursuit of tangible resources. The internet is not only the object of struggle but, in the information age, represents a critical infrastructure for pursuing larger geopolitical goals” (Shawn Powers and Michael Jablonski, The Real Cyberwar: The Political Economy of Internet Freedom [Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2015], 6). The policy was later embraced by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and expanded into a fleshed-out foreign policy plank of the United States: support for “the freedom to connect—the idea that governments should not prevent people from connecting to the internet, to websites, or to each other” (ibid., 6–9, 180–182).

  52. Jennifer Lee, “United States Backs Plan to Help Chinese Evade Government Censorship of Web,” New York Times, August 30, 2001; Thomas Lum, Internet Development and Information Control in the People’s Republic of China (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, February 10, 2006), https://fas.org/sgp/crs /row/RL33167.pdf; Murray Hiebert, “Counters to Chinese Checkers,” Far Eastern Economic Review, November 7, 2002.

  53. “Who Is Li Hongzhi?” BBC News, May 8, 2001, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/1223317.stm; William Dowell, “Interview with Li Hongzhi,” Time, May 10, 1999.

  54. “Media Reaction: Secretary Clinton’s Speech, U.S.-Japan Relations,” diplomatic cable, State Department, January 22, 2010, published by WikiLeaks, https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/10BEIJING167_a.html.

  55. Ken Berman, email message sent to Roger Dingledine, “A roadmap for Tor + IBB,” January 23, 2006, https://surveillancevalley.com/content/citations/a-roadmap-for-tor-ibb-february-08-2006.pdf.

  56. Roger Dingledine, email message sent to Ken Berman, “Meeting notes, Jan 11 2008,” January 15, 2008, https://surveillancevalley.com/content/citations/meeting-notes-jan-11-2008–15-january-2008.pdf.

  57. Roger Dingledine, email message sent to Ken Berman, “(FWD) Re: Tor news,” February 12, 2008, https://surveillancevalley.com/content/citations/email-from-roger-dingledine-to-ken-berman-fwd-re-tor-news-12-february-2008-bbg-tor-emails-stack-21.pdf.

  58. In 2007, Dingledine wrote his handler at the BBG about a conference where he met “a fellow who works with CIA and State Dept and is working on human rights.” In October 2008, Dingledine met with fifty FBI and DOJ agents to talk about Tor. “Keeping FBI informed of (and using!) Tor contributes to project and network sustainability,” he wrote to Ken Berman, describing the event. “Most people recognized that Tor has good uses—in fact, some of the agents in the audience told me they use Tor for their work already.” Roger Dingledine, email message sent to Ken Berman, “Notes from ITSG meeting, Oct 22–23,” November 22, 2008, https://surveillancevalley.com/content/citations/notes-from-itsg-meeting-oct-22-23-bbg-tor-emails-stack-21.pdf.

  59. Roger Dingledine, email message sent to Kelly DeYoe, “IBB notes for Sept,” October 10, 2007, https://surveillancevalley.com/content/citations/ibb-notes-for-sept-bbg-tor-emails-stack-21.pdf; Roger Dingledine, email message sent to Ken Berman, “State Dept work on human rights and anonymity?” September 12, 2006, https://surveillancevalley.com/content/citations/state-dept-work-on-human-rights-and-anonymity.pdf; Roger Dingledine, “Tor Development Roadmap, 2008–2011,” Tor Project, September 1, 2008, https://www.torproject.org/press/press kit/2008–12–19-roadmap-full.pdf.

  60. Roger Dingledine, email message sent to Ken Berman, “Draft proposal for TLS normalization,” October 9, 2007, https://surveillancevalley.com/content /citations/bug-reveal-october-09-2007-bbg-tor-emails-stack-21.pdf. This issue seems to have gone unaddressed for at least four years. Nick Mathewson, “xxx-draft-spec-for-TLS-normalization.txt” [tor-dev], January 31, 2011, https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2011-January/001100.html.

  61. The amount of funding Tor received from the Cyber-Threat Analytics program is not known. It ran from 2006 through 2008. “Tor: Sponsors,” Tor Project, accessed June 24, 2008, http://www.torproject.org/sponsors.html.en.

  62. “The Cyber-TA project is currently managed through the U.S. Army Research Laboratory’s Army Research Office (ARO) under Research Grant No. W911NF-06-1-0316.… In FY05 the Cyber-TA initiative was managed under the guidance of the Disruptive Technology Office (formerly ARDA).” “Welcome to the Cyber-TA Home Page,” Cyber-TA, accessed May 18, 2008, http://www.cyber-ta.org.

  63. Roger Dingledine, email message sent to Ken Bernman, “IBB/Tor notes for April,” May 12, 2008, https://surveillancevalley.com/content/citations/tor-notes-for-april-12-may-2008.pdf.

  64. Michael McFaul, Advancing Democracy Abroad: Why We Should and How We Can (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2009). This arm of the State Department would increasingly oversee the funding of Internet Freedom technologies, emulating the structure of a Silicon Valley venture capitalist firm and “financing as many disparate efforts as possible.” Brad Stone, “Aid Urged for Groups Fighting Internet Censors,” New York Times, January 20, 2010.

  65. Greenberg, This Machine Kills Secrets, 152–158.

  66. Jacob Appelbaum, “The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand,” January 12, 2003, accessed February 4, 2005, https://web.archive.org/web/20050204052358/http:// appelbaum.net:80/weblog/index.pl/2003/01/12#thefountainhead.

  67. Jake Appelbaum, “Resume,” accessed February 8, 2004, http://www.appelbaum.net/.

  68. “Interview by Esther Sassaman,” September 2005, accessed January 4, 2005, crypto.nsa.org.

  69. Lane Hartwell, “So Who Wants to Fuck a Robot,” Wired, June 10, 2007.

  70. These accusations came out in a major way after he was forced out of the Tor Project following an internal investigation of sexual misconduct. For example, here is San Francisco journalist Violet Blue on his time in San Francisco in the mid-2000: “He tried, in a variety of ways and in different situations and parties and events, to convince me to have sex with him. I said no over and over, and as time went by, he became angrier and angrier with me. I was working with an arts organization during those years, and we ended up kicking him out of our machine shop,” she wrote. “Jake had sexually targeted a female friend of mine. Her and I were going to a large tech party in December; I think it was a Wikimedia party, and Jimmy Wales was there. My friend was feeling hunted by Jake, and early in the party she said he was trying to isolate her, and told me she was scared. She is not a big or strong girl, nor is she loud, and he was trying to convince her to go into a stairwell with him. The convincing turned into trying to pull her away physically, grabbing at her hands.” Violet Blue, “‘But He Does Good Work,’” Medium, June 15, 2016, https://medium.com/@violetblue/but-he-does-good-work-6710df9d9029.


  71. Roger Dingledine, email message sent to Ken Bernman, “IBB/Tor notes for April,” May 12, 2008, https://surveillancevalley.com/content/citations/tor-notes-for-april-12-may-2008.pdf.

  72. Roger Dingledine, curriculum vitae, accessed March 8, 2008, https://www.freehaven.net/~arma/cv.html.

  73. “Mike, Jake, and I talked to Niels Provos, Google’s security guy, about how Google search can become more compatible with Tor,” wrote Dingledine to his handlers at the BBG. “Niels wants me to come give a talk at Google about Tor, including this issue, to maybe drum up more support for having Google interoperate better with Tor. I think I’m not going to try to squeeze that into my mid November trip, but rather do it a few months after that.” Roger Dingledine, email sent to Kelly DeYoe and Ken Berman, “(FWD) Notes from Niels, Google, Tor,” November 22, 2008, https://surveillancevalley.com/content/citations/email-from-roger-dingledine-to-bbgs-kelly-deyoe-and-ken-berman-fwd-notes-from-niels-google-tor-22-november-2008.pdf.

  74. “Upcoming plans, conferences, and schedules… Roger, Jake, and Linus meet with Swedish law enforcement.” Andrew Lewman, Executive Director, email message sent to Kelly DeYoe, program officer, BBG, “RE: contract BBGCON1807S6441,” March 10, 2010, https://surveillancevalley.com/content/citations /andrew-lewman-executive-director-to-kelly-deyoe-program-officer-bbg-re-contract-bbgcon1807s6441–10-march-2010-bbg-tor-contract-stack-2.pdf.

  75. An example of Roger Dingledine’s reports: “One of the best ways we’ve found for getting new relays is to go to conferences and talk to people in person. There are many thousands of people out there with spare fast network connections and a willingness to help save the world. Our experience is that visiting them in person produces much better results, long-term, than Slashdot articles.… The first is in Japan. The second is our first major high bandwidth node in New Zealand.”

  76. It would be led by Dingledine and Appelbaum. “All around the world there are people teaching other people how to safely use Tor and related applications. This training will be ramping up with projects like iFree, NGO-in-a-box, and the Global Voices seminars. We should help train the trainers about Tor, so they better understand the technology, issues, and tradeoffs and can then do a better job of training the users,” wrote Dingledine (Dingledine, “Tor Development Roadmap, 2008–2011”). Their plan to influence journalists in America appeared to be at odds with the US Information and Educational Exchange Act of 1948, known as the Smith-Mundt Act, which forbids the State Department and the Broadcasting Board of Governors funding any effort or organization that seeks to intentionally influence or sway public opinion in the United States (John Schwartz, “Over the Net and Around the Law? U.S. Computer Users Gain Access to Voice of America Broadcasts,” Washington Post, January 14, 1995).

  77. On numerous occasions, Tor employees discussed with BBG ways of influencing press coverage and perception. One example involved EPIC. Andrew Lewman, email message sent to Kelly DeYoe and Roger Dingledine, “EPIC, BBC, Tor, and FOIA,” September 10, 2013, https://surveillancevalley.com/content /citations/email-from-andrew-lewman-to-kelly-deyoe-and-roger-dingledine-epic-bbc-tor-and-foia-10-september-2013.pdf.

  78. WikiLeaks, email message sent to John Young, “Martha Stewart pgp,” Cryptome, January 7, 2007, https://cryptome.org/wikileaks/wikileaks-leak2.htm.

  79. Mona Mahmood, Maggie O’Kane, Chavala Madlena, and Teresa Smith, “Revealed: Pentagon’s Link to Iraqi Torture Centres,” Guardian, March 6, 2013.

  80. Scott Shane and Andrew W. Lehren, “Leaked Cables Offer Raw Look at U.S. Diplomacy,” New York Times, November 28, 2010.

  81. “Affidavit of Julian Paul Assange,” WikiLeaks, September 2, 2013, https://wikileaks.org/IMG/html/Affidavit_of_Julian_Assange.html.

  82. “In late 2010, when Assange seemed to be on the brink of long-term jail awaiting questioning for alleged sex crimes, one WikiLeaks staffer told me he hoped Appelbaum might even be the favored successor to Assange in WikiLeaks’ hierarchy.” Greenberg, This Machine Kills Secrets.

  83. Nathaniel Rich, “The American WikiLeaks Hacker,” Rolling Stone, December 1, 2010.

  84. Amy Goodman, “Part 2: Daniel Ellsberg and Jacob Appelbaum on the NDAA, WikiLeaks and Unconstitutional Surveillance,” Democracy Now, February 6, 2013, https://www.democracynow.org/2013/2/6/part_2_daniel_ellsberg_and_jacob _appelbaum_on_the_ndaa_wikileaks_and_unconstitutional_surveillance.

  85. Rich, “American WikiLeaks Hacker.”

  86. The American Civil Liberties Union partnered with Tor (“Privacy Groups Announce Developer Challenge for Mobile Apps,” press release, ACLU of Northern California, February 4, 2011, https://www.aclunc.org/news/privacy-groups-announce-developer-challenge-mobile-apps). Teach-in at Whitney Museum featuring “Jacob Appelbaum, computer security researcher, privacy advocate, hacker, and human rights activist” (“Laura Poitras: Surveillance Teach-In,” Whitney Museum, April 20, 2012, http://web.archive.org/web/20170521210801/http://whitney.org/Events/LauraPoitrasObservationAndTrust).

  87. “The FP Top 100 Global Thinkers,” Foreign Policy, November 26, 2012.

  88. Roger Dingledine, email message sent to Kelly DeYoe, “contract BBGCON1807S6441,” January 10, 2008, https://surveillancevalley.com/content /citations/BBGCON1807S6441-bbg-tor-contract-stack-9.pdf?1488563621.

  89. Elinor Mills, “Researcher Detained at U.S. Border, Questioned about WikiLeaks,” CNET, July 31, 2010, https://www.cnet.com/news/researcher-detained-at-u-s-border-questioned-about-wikileaks/.

  90. Andrew Lewman, email message sent to Ken Berman, “July Monthly Report from Tor,” August 10, 2010.

  91. Despite telling people he was being hunted by the US government, Jacob Appelbaum visited the BBG’s offices in Washington, DC, in 2011. Andrew Lewman, email message sent to Ken Berman and Kelly DeYoe, “RE: Tor Contract,” October 18, 2011, https://surveillancevalley.com/content/citations/email-from-tor-executive-director-andrew-lewman-to-bbgs-ken-berman-and-kelly-deyoe-re-tor-contract-18-october-2011-bbg-tor-emails-stack-8.pdf.

  92. Levine, “Notes on Tor Project Funding—Broadcasting Board of Governors.” Actually, the State Department funding took a dip in 2011 from the $913,000 that came in in 2010. It’s not clear why the funding decreased, but it was just temporary, and previous funding levels were restored just two years later. In 2013, State Department funding amounted to $882,312 (Levine, “Notes on Tor Project Funding—State Department”). Meanwhile, Tor Pentagon funding continued to go up: $503,706 in 2011 and $876,099 in 2012 (Levine, “Notes on Tor Project Funding—the Pentagon”).

  93. “IRS Form 990,” Tor Project Inc., 2011, https://surveillancevalley.com/content/citations/2011-tor-project-form-990.pdf; “Navy Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance Program Information,” Catalog of Federal Assistance, accessed July 6, 2017, https://www.cfda.gov/?s=program&mode=form&tab=step1&id=e957455d d32744ebfc0f3ec8a9c18683. The Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command, known as SPAWAR, is headquartered in Sand Diego and staffed by nearly eight thousand people all over the world. It engages in everything from intelligence gathering to satellite communications networks and nuclear weapons targeting systems. SPAWAR also houses a secret offensive cyber unit that wages electronic war against foreign adversaries. As one SPAWAR spokesman put it: “We’re on every continent, including Antarctica. We’re on the oceans, below the seas, in the air and in space.” SPAWAR’s objective was to maintain full-spectrum information dominance—not just for itself but also for the rest of the intelligence and military community. It seemed Tor helped it fulfill its mission.

  94. “Office of Management and Budget Data Collection Form,” Tor Project Inc., 2011, https://surveillancevalley.com/content/citations/2011-tor-project-dcf.pdf. Because Tor’s Broadcasting Board of Governors funding is distributed across several subsidiary organizations, including Radio Free Asia and the Open Technology Fund, and because public accounting of the funds is not uniform or complete, it can be difficult to pin down the exact amount of money it gets from this age
ncy (Levine, “Notes on Tor Project Funding—Broadcasting Board of Governors.”)

  95. Alec Ross, “Social Media: Cause, Effect and Response,” NATO Review, 2011, http://web.archive.org/web/20160914003415/http://www.nato.int/docu /review/2011/Social_Medias/21st-century-statecraft/EN/index.htm.

  96. Ron Nixon, “U.S. Groups Helped Nurture Arab Uprisings,” New York Times, April 14, 2011. In the lead-up to the Arab Spring, in 2008, the State Department teamed with Facebook, Google, MTV, and other corporate partners to launch the Alliance of Youth Movements Summit, billed as an event that would “Bring Together Global Youth Groups, Tech Experts to Find Best Ways to Use Digital Media to Promote Freedom and Justice, Counter Violence, Extremism and Oppression.” This effort was launched by Alec Ross and his State Department colleague Jared Cohen, who would later head up Google’s JigSaw think tank, but similar training sessions took place almost every year. “Announcement on Alliance of Youth Movements Summit, December 3–5: Summit Brings Youth Groups, Tech Experts Together to Promote Freedom,” US Department of State press release, America.gov, November 18, 2008, http://web.archive.org/web/20090306184954/http://www.america.gov/st/texttrans-english/2008 /November/20081120122321eaifas0.3440363.html.

  97. Agence France-Presse estimated the US government spent $76 million from 2007 through 2011 on programs focusing on “online freedom.” Rob Lever, “Online Freedom? There’ll be an App for That,” AFP News, June 12, 2012, https://sg.news.yahoo.com/online-freedom-app-coming-185419926.html.

  98. “Jacob Appelbaum Presents Tor at Arab Bloggers Workshop 2009,” Global Voices, December 9, 2009; Andrew Lewman, email message sent to Kelly DeYoe, “RE: contract BBGCON1807S6441,” November 8, 2011, https://surveillancevalley.com/content/citations/email-from-andrew-lewman-executive-director-to-kelly-deyoe-program-officer-bbg-re-contract-bbgcon1807s6441-8-november-2011-bbg-tor-contract-stack-5.pdf; Roger Dingledine, “Trip Report, Arab Bloggers Meeting, Oct 3–7,” Tor Project (blog), October 16, 2011, https://blog.torproject.org/blog/trip-report-arab-bloggers-meeting-oct-3-7. Tor’s Middle East trainings began in 2009. In December of that year, Jacob Appelbaum did a big tour of the Middle East before heading to the end-of-the-year activist blowout at the Chaos Computer Club conference in Berlin. A monthly activity report filed by Tor with the BBG shows that Jacob met with journalists from Al Jazeera in Qatar and trained a group of activists in Amman, Jordan. The highlight of the trip was a training session at the Arab Bloggers Conference in Beirut. Andrew Lewman, email message sent to Kelly DeYoe, “BBGCON1807S644.”

 

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