The Yasha Levine Comedy Hour

[EricBarbour]

Of course, you may not find this amusing.

Levine did a report about the funding sources of TOR back in July:
Almost everyone involved in developing Tor was (or is) funded by the US government
Not exactly new or novel information, but little known to most people on the Web.

His reward? A shrieking hate-fest on Twitter -- courtesy of the same people who run (and promote) TOR.
How leading Tor developers and advocates tried to smear me after I reported their US Government ties

Funny, we keep seeing the same names associated with "net neutrality", anti-censorship of the net, and, um, Wikimedia: Google, Omidyar, the Berkman Center, the EFF, etc. etc.

Surprisingly, the smears weren’t waged by the usual fringe anonymous-troll types, but rather by some of the most prominent privacy and anti-surveillance names in the country—top people from groups like the ACLU, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Freedom of the Press Foundation, and Pierre Omidyar’s First Look Media.

Take Jillian York, “Director for International Freedom of Expression” at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a tech industry lobby group funded by Silicon Valley’s largest corporations. As soon as the story came out, she counseled her 45,000 followers to ignore my story

Morgan Marquis-Boire, a former Googler who was recently poached by Pierre Omidyar to run security at First Look, called me a loony conspiracy theorist for reporting on Tor’s government funding—but then contradicted himself by arguing that this “conspiracy theory” is a matter of public record.

Then there’s ACLU’s Christopher Soghoian, who compared my Tor reporting to deadly anti-Semitic propaganda. Soghoian has been dubbed the “Ralph Nader for the Internet Age” by Wired, but it’s a curious analogy. Nader’s fame came from fighting corporate power and greed; but Soghoian has spent his entire career sucking from the corporate teat, indiscriminately moving from one oligarch’s foundation to another: graduate school scholarship from Google in 2006/2007; the Koch brothers’ Institute for Humane Studies, chaired by Charles Koch himself, in 2008/2009; fellowship at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, an outfit funded by the State Department, USAID, Soros, Google, Omidyar, and so on; Soros Open Society fellowship in 2011/2012; TEDGlobal Fellow in 2012, funded in part by Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos; and most recently, a fellowship at Yale Law School’s Information Society Project, which is funded by Google, Ford Foundation, Soros, Microsoft and many many more.

Well? Am I supposed to take this stuff seriously or not? Who's more in the wrong here?

[Zoloft]

Of course, you may not find this amusing.

Levine did a report about the funding sources of TOR back in July:
Almost everyone involved in developing Tor was (or is) funded by the US government
Not exactly new or novel information, but little known to most people on the Web.

His reward? A shrieking hate-fest on Twitter -- courtesy of the same people who run (and promote) TOR.
How leading Tor developers and advocates tried to smear me after I reported their US Government ties

Funny, we keep seeing the same names associated with "net neutrality", anti-censorship of the net, and, um, Wikimedia: Google, Omidyar, the Berkman Center, the EFF, etc. etc.

Surprisingly, the smears weren’t waged by the usual fringe anonymous-troll types, but rather by some of the most prominent privacy and anti-surveillance names in the country—top people from groups like the ACLU, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Freedom of the Press Foundation, and Pierre Omidyar’s First Look Media.

Take Jillian York, “Director for International Freedom of Expression” at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a tech industry lobby group funded by Silicon Valley’s largest corporations. As soon as the story came out, she counseled her 45,000 followers to ignore my story

Morgan Marquis-Boire, a former Googler who was recently poached by Pierre Omidyar to run security at First Look, called me a loony conspiracy theorist for reporting on Tor’s government funding—but then contradicted himself by arguing that this “conspiracy theory” is a matter of public record.

Then there’s ACLU’s Christopher Soghoian, who compared my Tor reporting to deadly anti-Semitic propaganda. Soghoian has been dubbed the “Ralph Nader for the Internet Age” by Wired, but it’s a curious analogy. Nader’s fame came from fighting corporate power and greed; but Soghoian has spent his entire career sucking from the corporate teat, indiscriminately moving from one oligarch’s foundation to another: graduate school scholarship from Google in 2006/2007; the Koch brothers’ Institute for Humane Studies, chaired by Charles Koch himself, in 2008/2009; fellowship at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, an outfit funded by the State Department, USAID, Soros, Google, Omidyar, and so on; Soros Open Society fellowship in 2011/2012; TEDGlobal Fellow in 2012, funded in part by Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos; and most recently, a fellowship at Yale Law School’s Information Society Project, which is funded by Google, Ford Foundation, Soros, Microsoft and many many more.

Well? Am I supposed to take this stuff seriously or not? Who's more in the wrong here?

The Pando articles kick up a lot of dust. But in order for their premise to be accurate, you have to assume that everyone mentioned in them is lying.

That's why everyone is angry at the author.

There are revolving-door histories throughout the security industry. These should be publicized, and even criticized. But the level of paranoia in Levine's article is appalling.