A year late and a dollar short? (was FC: U.S. government patents anonymous browsing "Onion Routing" technique)

[John Young]

The day after Paul Sylverson's talk on onion routing at USENIX 10,
he described his attempt to get the counsel at Naval Research
Laboratory to obtain an open license for the technology, and how
he got a brush-off in favor of legacy-patenting whose procedure
was more familiar to the counsel and, not least, superior officers
at NRL (who, in the Navy traditional disdain for their engineers,
did not quite understand what the technology was or its 
exact purpose, much less the concept of sharing credit for naval 
research with unranked maverick civilians).

Now, the suspicious will wonder if ONI knew exactly
who Paul, Michael and David had been collaborating with
over the years of onion routing research, and whispered in
the ear of counsel and senior officers as if they worked for
a major ISP to exclude the people from the patent who
did not abide terms of joint mil/civ operations service,
that is to use civilian technology to cloak the classified
features.

Open source is a contradiction for the mil, but not, as far
I've heard, with the NRL researchers. The guys whose
names are on the patent are likely taking the hit for upstairs
policy and those onion features below the routing.



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