Hey everyone,
We had an interesting information session today at my university with one of Tor's main developers David Goulet. At first he explained how Tor works and showed some interesting graphs related to Tor usage across countries, particularly where internet is/gets censored. He said that China is the only country that they know of, that has been able to block out all of Tor's services and traffic.
He also said that the only exit nodes that exist right now are the ones in Germany and Switzerland (Due to their stronger internet rights). And he said that he strongly recommended against running an exit node anywhere else. (the reason is pretty obvious). Basically Tor is at the hands of the European law to keep safe and up and running.
He neither confirmed nor denied that he has been bullied by intelligence agencies before. He said that admitting to it would be like admitting that the law enforcement's scare tactics actually work. (So, yes I guess)
Somebody asked him if they had to put back doors into Tor (Like anyone would admit to something), and of course he denied it. He claimed that the community itself reviews the code, which would make something like this easily visible.\
Most of his answers to my questions were pretty standard and expected.
Now here comes the big one that left me totally unconvinced. He had mentioned that they are largely funded by the community and some research institutions, including the US military. And, on one of the slides, in bold red color, he had mentioned that funding often affects the direction of their development.
So, I asked him how their development targets is affected by these sponsors and whether he could give some examples, to which he gave a very vague and unsatisfactory response that made absolutely no sense. He talked about how they need to have funding to keep servers up and running blahh blahh blahhh insert non relevant stuff here, which is far from what I asked.
Overall, the last part left me demanding more and definitely puts Tor in the gray zone for me.
What do you guys think about this?