Snowden supported Tor at 2 Gbps largest output node

Edward Snowden often got into the lens with a laptop, where the green Tor sticker flaunted. Now it turned out where he came from. Wired reporters interviewed several participants in the events of November-December 2012, who then spoke with Snowden.

It turns out that while working on a contract with the NSA, Edward Snowden kept a Tor output node at 2 Gbit / s. Moreover, he persuaded colleagues at work to add more servers!

Actually, that’s how he got stickers. On November 18, 2012, he wrote to Runa Sandvik, one of the leading developers of the Tor Project, asking them to send a stack of stickers to distribute at work, that is, at Dell. Snowden explained that he supported “one of the largest output nodes called TheSignal at 2 Gb / s.”

From the Tor network, traffic goes to the open Internet through output nodes, which are often the “bottleneck” in the total bandwidth. So the efforts of thousands of volunteers who agreed to allow traffic through themselves are very appreciated. It turns out that Snowden was one of the volunteers even before he sent hundreds of thousands of NSA secret documents to the press, became a state criminal and put his life at risk.

He sent a letter to Rune from [email protected], the same one with whom he contacted Greenwald two weeks later. Despite using anonymous mail, Snowden gave Sandwick his name and address in Hawaii in order to receive the package. Although the girl had not heard anything about Snowden (no one had heard of him then), she was planning a trip to Hawaii a month later on vacation - and invited Edward to meet and give a lecture on Tor for a local audience. Snowden was enthusiastic about the idea.

In December 2012, Snowden organized the CryptoParty crypto party in Hawaii - such events are held around the world. Party participants share their experiences with cryptographic tools. After Rune’s standard Tor presentation, Snowden delivered a 30–40-minute lecture on open source encryption software for TrueCrypt disk to local residents . The whole event was recorded on a video camera by Snowden's girl, but the video was not published, it seems, because of a bad sound. Runa Sandvik herself recalls that Edward impressed her as a very polite and extremely intelligent person. At least about TrueCrypt, he spoke very sensibly, and on the Tor network there was not a single aspect that he would not understand.


Asher Wolf

Snowden previously contacted CryptoParty, the creator of the idea and crypto party organizer Asher Wolf from Melbourne, to ask her for advice on organizing. She advised to make things simpler and focus on a single topic. “If I knew that this was someone from the NSA, I would go and shoot myself,” says Escher Wolf. “But I'm kinda proud that he decided to educate the locals.” This is a big deal. We rely on volunteers who put themselves at risk by giving lectures in difficult places and situations. It was a huge risk for him to give a lecture at a crypto party, while at the same time working for the NSA. I'm glad he did that. This is a goddamn legend. ”

Escher hopes that the crypto party has become one of the factors that prompted Snowden to carry out his plan.

Snowden organized the party shortly after writing the first letter to Glenn Greenwald and waiting for an answer. The CryptoParty wiki still has his entries under the nickname Cincinnatus.