The initial funding for Tor came from the Navy (where it was created) and the State Department (where it was helpful for Arab spring)
Association with the CIA or In-Q-Tel is not necessarily a bad thing. They have unique requirements for operational security like many other Signal users?
The CIA has access to zero-days. They will just use those for targeted attacks and are generally not in the business of mass surveillance? Whereas the FBI and NSA sorta are to achieve their respective mandates
The State department has since walked back its love for international freedom of speech with the populist movement in Brazil. They’re active in suppressing speech there, just like they were in promoting it in the Middle East.
Notably they want it more widely used because it's really not useful if the only people that connect to Tor are spies. Makes finding spies super easy ("X connected to Tor. Okay, let's go arrest X"). How do you prevent that? Doesn't take a genius to figure that out...
Similarly, CIA/Navy/whatever doesn't want their tools to have zero-days. You might think "zero-days for me, but not for thee" but come on... we all know that doesn't work. If there's an exploit, the exploit works for anyone. You may have an edge in knowing where to look, but you're not going to maintain that edge for long. Worse, good luck finding out if someone else finds out. How do you prevent adversaries from exploiting your tools? Doesn't take a genius to figure that out...
I really hate these conspiracies. Like come on. Yeah, we should be highly critical of US spy agencies and apply a lot of scrutiny. But not everything they touch results in a landmine. They aren't all powerful gods. And they're up against some serious adversaries like China, Russia, and yes, Israel, and the most important one of them all... themselves! Spooks are spooks. They don't trust their neighbors, they don't trust themselves.
And if they were omniscient, surely they'd know the very first rule of security: if there's a backdoor, somebody will find it at the least conveniently possible time.
In a statement, WikiLeaks indicated that the initial stockpile it put online was part of a broader collection of nearly 9,000 files that would be posted over time describing code developed in secret by the CIA to steal data from a range of targets. WikiLeaks said it redacted lists of CIA surveillance targets, though it said they included targets and machines in Latin America, Europe and the United States.
"Russia Today was for 10 years almost the only way to know what's really going on in my country".
I'm only being half-sarcastic. RT will cover factual issues about Western countries that the state-endorsed media won't. But they're still disinformation outlets that should be consumed with a massive grain of salt, just like RFE and RFA.
That's a ridiculous take. Yes, Russian propaganda works best when they are based on a grain of truth, and it often is. However, it is just that - a propaganda machine serving a dictator.
Radio Free Europe was/is not a propaganda outlet any more than the BBC is a propaganda outlet (in fact, this is why Trump hates it). To an authoritarian, free press looks like propaganda.
Showcasing what makes your society great is propaganda only inasmuch as it casts the failures of other models into sharper relief. Liberal democracy is not a propaganda trick, it's just better.
I mean… yes the BBC is very much a propaganda outlet as is every single modern media organization. People who claim their media isn’t propaganda have already been brainwashed.
BBC right before the brexit vote was like: "now we listen to this well spoken university professor tell us why brexit will fix all our problems", and then, to offer balanced views: "we will listen to this random person who likes europe and we picked from a street 3 minutes ago so they don't have a nice coherent speech and will sound like they're stupid"
I'm sorry but this is such a midwit take. Your uber-skepticism of "every single modern media organization" does not make you a savvy free-thinker, it just makes you more likely to fall down some gibbering conspiratorial rabbit hole on youtube or tiktok.
Yes, media entities have biases and viewpoints; no, that doesn't make them propaganda organs.
