"For what it's worth, this is about the point where I get 
    off the Snowden train. It's true that some of these 
    disclosures are of clear public interest. In particular, 
    I'm thinking about the details of NSA efforts to 
    infiltrate and corrupt the standards setting groups that 
    produce commercial crypto schemes."

If anything this new information should put more people on the Snowden train. In the 90s, legislation was proposed which would have put backdoors everywhere via the Clipper Chip. Back then, we voted against that bill and all was good. This new information is shocking because we've already told the government that backdooring things was unacceptable behavior, yet they've done so anyways. We should all be outraged by this because it clearly doesn't represent the interest of the people.

The Internet was made by DARPA. Let's stop using it.

I am really sick of these arguments. Do you realize how much research goes into Tor and how many university researchers are associated with it (Cambridge, Waterloo)? Furthermore, can you really think someone like the Tor core developers (Dingledine and Mathweson) can sacrifice their entire reputation just for putting a backdoor? The code is out there. They have a Git repository and they have an active, healthy developer community. It's not like TrueCrypt, where change logs read like, "Minor fixes" and there is no public repository in 2013.

Someone should bring proof of the alleged backdoors or just shut up. Because conspiracy theories are not only stupid, they are annoying. This issue has been addressed on the tor-talk list many times. Please show one iota of proof.

And I say this as a Tor user who has not only donated to the project but also runs a relay.

This sort of thing is alive and well in US schools, too. The official policy of the Seattle Public School system is to stamp out racism in all its forms, and notice how many forms there are. (Note in particular the Cultural Racism section that includes, "emphasizing individualism as opposed to a more collective ideology" as a form of racism that, by official policy, is to be stamped out by the government education system):

http://web.archive.org/web/20060522101405/http://www.seattle...