Oddbean

Right. It's what i already told. I don't know much about cryptography, just a few things, but when i have a project being funded by the USA government while it's using a USA navy algorythm, doesn't mean it's ok and that there is not a backdoor or something because the code is open and can and was review by several people. Funding a project that uses your cryptography and that can be used against you, makes no sense to me, except if you have a backdoor. The recent incident with xz-utils also shows that it is possible. Yes it was revealed because it's open but it is possible. Besides that, i myself, all my life when i wanted to hide something, i did it in public view with 100% success so far.

You have a very wise attitude to these things, that you should keep. But an indication of scale might be useful. The Thing is rightly legendary in real life spy shenanigans, and a dramatic example of hiding things in plain sight. https://yandex.com/turbo/en.wikipedia.org/s/wiki/The_Thing_(listening_device) During the course of the operation, it was only handled by a few people, none of whom had much technical knowledge, and then it sat on a shelf. Tor is made of transparent digital code instead of opaque wood, it has been handled daily by experts around the globe, and there are literally tens of millions of copies. Finding out there was a back door all along would be like finding out every Toyota Corolla has a "Decepticon" form and no mechanic ever noticed until one day they rose up and took over the world. I, for one, will welcome our new robotic overlords, and I have always treated my Toyota with kindness and respect. I don't lose sleep over it, though.

AES and RSA weren't actually DARPA or NSA products. They were designed by academics who entered them into both USA and international competitions for new algorithms. The NSA would love the ability to read everyone's mail, but the global banking industry needs cryptography to work.

IDK exactly what algorithms we use here in military radios. Even though i was trained on them. The banks have far more influence over the levers of power than any Director-General of the NSA. They need cryptography algorithms to work, or else they'd have to reopen a lot of physical branches. That doesn't mean they need Tor's _implementation_ of those algorithms to work, but thats a much smaller problem, and one we covered in detail alreadyc