Re: [tor-talk] NSA supercomputer

[Paul Syverson <syverson@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, Apr 05, 2013 at 03:28:49PM -0400, Griffin Boyce wrote:
> Gregory Disney <gregory.disney@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 
> > Just saying TOR was created by the Naval Research Laboratory a part of
> > DARPA. Since it's inception they could index, spider and track the dark
> > net.
> 
> 
> The Naval Research Lab didn't "create" Tor, unless you think that grant
> money is physically capable of writing code.

Sorry no that's wrong. See my earlier post. Roger and Nick did not
submit a grant proposal for something they wanted to do and then this
receive funding from NRL (which is primarily a producer of research
work not of research funding, again see the links in my earlier post).
I submitted proposals and obtained the inital funding, and the three
of us worked together under the funding I received, me as an employee,
Roger and Nick as contractors.  Saying something like that they were
sponsored by NRL is akin to saying that they are now sponsored by the
Tor Project. Maybe you would want to say that, but I find it
misleading.

For good or ill it is standard and common in modern English usage to
refer to a collective named entity under which people work for the
singular or collective actions of individuals. (Don't get me started
on action theory, personal identity, and causality.)  By your
reasoning the Tor Project has not done anything: Mike did this, Arturo
did that, etc.

> 
> Roger Dingledine created Tor with Nick Matthewson. Since then it's been
> expanded upon greatly by a *huge* number of computer scientists.

Roger, Nick, and I created Tor in the sense that we designed it
together. For what it's worth, the earliest code base for the version
of onion routing that was to become known as Tor was taken (with
approval) from Matej Pfajfar from his undergrad project at Cambridge
U, although all of that was gone from the codebase within a few years
or so. The three of us actually started calling what we were doing Tor
when working off an earlier design done arising c.  1997 by David
Goldschlag, Mike Reed and myself (all NRL employees at the time, if
you're keeping score on that count). The Pfajfar code was written by
him definitely based on the earlier design since he wouldn't know then
about what Roger, Nick, and I designed. (You may want to read up
an the Ship of Theseus to figure out which is the real Tor ;>)

Your last point is the most salient. Lots of people with lots of
different employers, funders, affiliations, etc. have contributed.
Whether they were employees or contractors of the Tor Project,
Inc., they were all part of the Tor Project.

aloha,
Paul
_______________________________________________
tor-talk mailing list
tor-talk@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-talk