Are Rogue NSA Agents Tipping Off Tor to Its Vulnerabilities?

The Tor Project is a great way
for people to cover their tracks on the Internet. Because of this,
some in the federal government, specifically the National Security
Agency (NSA),
really dislikes Tor. So it comes as a bit of a surprise that an
executive with Tor claims that NSA agents helping the project. A
few of them, at least.

Andrew Lewman, who handles operations for the
Internet-anonymizer tool, claimes that he receives tip-offs on
“probably [a] monthly” basis that he believes come from the
NSA and Britain’s equivalent agency, the Government Communications
Headquarters. From the BBC:

“There are plenty of people in both organisations who can
anonymously leak data to us to say – maybe you should look here,
maybe you should look at this to fix this,” he said. “And they
have.” …

He acknowledged that because of the way the Tor Project received
such information, he could not prove who had sent it.

“It’s a hunch,” he said. “Obviously we are not going to ask for
any details.

“You have to think about the type of people who would be able to
do this and have the expertise and time to read Tor source code
from scratch for hours, for weeks, for months, and find and
elucidate these super-subtle bugs or other things that they
probably don’t get to see in most commercial software.

“And the fact that we take a completely anonymous bug report
allows them to report to us safely.”

He added that he had been told by William Binney, a former NSA
official turned whistleblower, that one reason NSA workers might
have leaked such information was because many were “upset that they
are spying on Americans.”

Reason covered some of the NSA’s recent anti-Tor
activities
here. 

And, earlier this month, Reason‘s Elizabeth Brown
noted
that “the FBI is using hacker-like techniques to track
Tor users, in an effort the agency calls ‘Operation Torpedo.'” At
the same time, Tor receives millions of
dollars in funding from various federal agencies, like the
State Department. 

As TechCrunch‘s Alex Wilhelm
summarizes: “A project to help Internet users be private that
the United States has funded in the past, and currently funds
today, is being hacked by the NSA, while other actors of state
agencies appear to be leaking found vulnerabilities to Tor itself.
That’s just so damn efficient it almost sounds like
government.”