Tor Messenger 0.1.0b5 is released

FBI Director Comey is spending quite a bit of time these days testifying before Congress, and not all his auditors are entirely happy with his rumored decision to charge Mrs. Clinton or his insistence on breaking American cybersecurity (not to mention privacy) in order to spy better on dead criminals or whatever nonsensical excuse he offers.

Suggestion for a fun PR stunt:

Get some journalists to communicate by TM over Twitter DM with a well known whistleblower and Tor supporter currently residing in Russia, and make sure someone passes a note to Comey to tell him about it during his testimony.

> We plan to highlight this feature a bit more.

Good.

> I guess without the two people you mentioned :)

I defer to your judgment on that score, but you/Shari *must* issue a statement on DOJ orders served on Apple and other companies, especially the rumored forthcoming backdoor order naming WhatsApp.

Oppressive governments may be willing to cooperate in a concerted attack on their perceived common enemy, human rights activists who use Tor, Ricochet, WhatsApp, Signal in iPhone, or whatever. On this basis, it seems not impossible that the security services of USA, UK, CN, RU, IR, VN might ink deals to collaborate in "rubber hose" breakage of cybersecurity measures protecting Open Source software. Even though those countries would be unlikely to collaborate on anything else, they are all likely to see HRW, Riseup Networks, Tor Project, WhisperSystems, Silent Circle, Apple, etc, as "dangerous adversaries" worthy of overt oppression.

It may now be true that the hand of every government is raised against us.

> Oppressive governments may be willing to cooperate in a concerted attack on their perceived common enemy, human rights activists who use Tor, Ricochet, WhatsApp, Signal in iPhone, or whatever. On this basis, it seems not impossible that the security services of USA, UK, CN, RU, IR, VN might ink deals to collaborate in "rubber hose" breakage of cybersecurity measures protecting Open Source software.

Not a day later, comes this grim news:

http://thehill.com/policy/cybersecurity/273047-china-asks-fbi-chief-to-…
China asks FBI chief to help battle terrorism, hackers
Cory Bennett
15 Mar 2016

> Chinese leaders on Monday urged FBI Director James Comey to work more closely with his Beijing counterparts on Internet security and anti-terrorism cases.
>
> The message came during a meeting in Beijing between Comey and Chinese Public Security Minister Guo Shengkun, according to Xinhua, a state-run news agency.
>
> “The two sides agreed to have more pragmatic cooperation in cybersecurity and anti-terrorism,” the report said.

A key point here is that China (and increasingly, the US--- cf Prepresident Trump) have rather broad interpretations of the meaning of the word "terrorism". China already uses this term to include political dissidents, and recently FBI keeps broadening its own use of the term, to cover for example eco-activists, animal-rights activists, BLM activists, divestment activists, social-justice activists, etc. (since any of these people, according to FBI, could turn violent at any moment, or might become "anarchists" or cybersecurity enthusiasts).

The major tech companies are outraged that the USG never really supported their attempts to stand up to Chinese demands for data on Chinese citizens (and exiles living in "the West"), and have been further outraged by the hypocrisy of FBI's anti-encryption campaign (CWII) and NSA's all-pervasive economic espionage.

And now it seems FBI and NSA are considering voluntarily sharing with the government of China the personal data of US persons and proprietary information of US companies which they collect under "counter-terror" mandates. What next? NSA sharing its data trove with the government of RU? VN? IR?

All the world's governments increasingly see themselves at war with the giant tech companies, because these companies increasingly operate independently of any government's control. A spate of trade treaties even prohibits national governments from enacting laws which would attempt to bring them back under government control. So to some extent, CWII ties in with a rather desperate attempt by the world's government to wrest back control of their national portion of the global economy. Hence demands such as these by the governments of USA and CN and other nations:

> China has also irked the international business community with a series of national security laws that foreign businesses say could give Beijing access to their source code and user data.

All the world's governments also see themselves at war with their own citizens, because increasingly the masses everywhere see their interests as being grossly abused by the political/economic elite.

So in broad outline, the history of the 21st Century seems likely to involve a grand global struggle between governments, corporate mega-conglomerates, and citizens. All three of these groups will increasingly tend to put the situation like this:

It's all of them against all of us.