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20 sats \ 7 replies \ @okpj 11 Jan \ parent \ on: Why I'm Bullish 2: SeedSigner bitcoin
I am conflicted about Tails being sponsored/funded by the US Department of State.
I'd forgotten about this but it doesn't concern me.
- Its an open source linux project. Governments support such projects
- It makes sense that they would support it. They can't develop their own stuff and the smart ones know that if they want their agents to be secure they should use open source
- Governments do make honey pot projects but usually they have ridiculous claims and are not open source
- Tor is supported by state actors as the Internet was.
- Snowden and many other security experts recommend Tails. That doesn't mean it is secure but it is a good signal.
Its good to be cautious and I'm not saying that you should just trust Tails but if a state actor touching a project is grounds for it to be off limits alone... well that to me is foolish.
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I will add that the State department under Hilary Clinton was very vocal about using social media like Twitter and Facebook to facilitate the Arab spring movement. I suspect this is the reasoning behind the funding. The US government hands out money to many projects and companies. I feel much better about this than say the money that was given to the social media platforms. But, honestly I don't feel good about any of it.
The motives aren't what counts though. The code and security are. It isn't hard to monitor an OS to see if it is phoning home on your activities. I'd be shocked if they were able to pull that off without privacy activists and developers spotting it. Far more likely that Apple or Microsoft are partnering with the gov than Tails.
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I appreciate your feedback! I was not implying Tails OS should be avoided. The sponsorship is just something I only recently became aware of.
In the end Tails OS is a sensitive open source project that has a community of people reviewing its code. This goes a long way in comparison to trusting any trillion dollar corporations black box.
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Gotcha.
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Information is sparse using search engines, and I don’t feel comfortable linking to unverifiable Reddit speculation on security matters, but here is the list of sponsors on Tails’ website. The US Department of State is one of their largest sponsors as of 2023, over $100k USD.
Not sure what to make of it, and not fear mongering. Just wonder if it might be a conflict of interest.
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The DOD is the largest employer on the planet. That doesn't even count the periphery of contractors. Sponsoring a project like trails makes sense and 100K to them is peanuts.
In the army we had a tactical fire computer that we ran Linux on sometimes because we wanted to test hardware. So I'm sure 23 years later there is a team testing something and they got funding for a project that they viewed as tight.
I'm not recommending for or against but if the code is open source it can be reviewed and audited. I think the issue really is in compilers that are trusted and not audited and legacy software that NSA spooks will submit code to.
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