NSA Agents Leak Tor Bugs To Developers

An anonymous reader writes: We've known for a while that NSA specifically targets Tor, because they want to disrupt one of the last remaining communication methods they aren't able to tap or demand access to. However, not everybody at the NSA is on board with this strategy. Tor developer Andrew Lewman says even as flaws in Tor are rooted out by the NSA and British counterpart GCHQ, other agents from the two organizations leak those flaws directly to the developers, so they can be fixed quickly. He said, "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." Lewman estimates the Tor Project receives these reports on a monthly basis. He also spoke about how a growing amount of users will affect Tor. He suggests a massive company like Google or Facebook will eventually have to take up the task of making Tor scale up to millions of users.

Larger Tor Isn't Necessarily Better

[macromorgan]

While I love and appreciate Tor as a means to remain anonymous online, I work for a company that's the victim of quite a bit of "comment" spam hailing from among other places Tor. The spam ranges from individual businesses promoting themselves for their own benefit under false pretenses, all the way to professional spammers gaming the system (mostly locksmiths). I hope if the Tor network expands the list of exit nodes remains maintained so I can continue to blacklist content from those sources... it's heavy handed but beats swimming in spam.