Snowden supported Tor's largest output node at 2 Gbps

Edward Snowden was often caught in the lens along with a laptop with a green Tor sticker. Now it turned out where he came from him. Wired journalists interviewed several participants in the events of November-December 2012, who then communicated with Snowden.

It turns out that during the NSA contract, Edward Snowden kept the output Tor node at 2 Gbps. Moreover, he persuaded colleagues at work to add more servers!

Actually, this is how the stickers appeared. On November 18, 2012, he wrote to Runa Sandvik (Runa Sandvik), one of the leading developers of the Tor Project, with a request to send a pile of stickers to distribute at work, that is, at Dell. Snowden explained that he supports "one of the largest output nodes called TheSignal at 2 Gbps".
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From the Tor network, traffic goes to the open Internet through the exit nodes, which are often “bottlenecks” in the total bandwidth. So the efforts of thousands of volunteers who agreed to pass traffic through themselves are greatly appreciated. It turns out that Snowden was one of the volunteers even before he sent hundreds of thousands of secret documents to the press to the press, became a state criminal and put his life at risk.

He sent a letter to Rune from cincinnatus@lavabit.com, the one from whom he had contacted Greenwald two weeks later. Despite the use of anonymous mail, Snowden provided his name and address in Hawaii to receive the package. Although the girl had not heard of Snowden (no one had heard of him then), she was just planning a trip to Hawaii a month later on vacation - and invited Edward to meet and give a lecture on Tor to a local audience. Snowden enthusiastically received the idea.

In December 2012, Snowden organized a crypto party CryptoParty in Hawaii - such events are held around the world. Participants of the "parties" share their experience in the use of cryptographic tools. After the standard presentation of the Runes about Tor, Snowden delivered a 30–40-minute lecture on the open source program for the end-to-end encryption of the TrueCrypt disk. The whole event was recorded on a video camera by a girl named Snowden, but they did not publish the video because of the bad sound. Runa Sandvik herself recalls that Edward impressed her as a very polite and extremely intelligent person. At least, he told about TrueCrypt very sensibly, and there was not a single aspect on the Tor network that he wouldn’t understand.


Esher wolf

Snowden previously contacted the author of the CryptoParty idea and crypto party organizer Esher Wolf from Melbourne to ask her for advice on the organization. She advised to do everything easier and focus on a single topic. “If I knew that this was someone from the NSA, I would have gone and shot myself,” says Escher Wolf. “But I'm kind of proud that he decided to train the locals.” This is a big deal. We look forward to volunteers who put themselves at risk by giving lectures in challenging places and situations. For him, it was a great risk to lecture at the crypto party, while at the same time working for the NSA. I'm glad he did that. That's the damn legend. ”

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

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