Its inspiring to see so much financial commitment to an idea like this, but disheartening to see it go to the wrong place -- a Kickstarter, not the Tor Project.
Maybe we, as the FOSS community, need to start utilizing crowd sourcing more. Maybe we can use the marketing from Heartbleed etc. to launch a Kickstarter to audit OpenSSL, and use the NSA revelations to launch a Kickstarter to run more exit nodes (which are depereately needed -- about 1k nodes for 2M users). The project to audit Truecrypt seemed to reap the benefits of this quite effectively.
I'm not familiar with the TOS for Kickstarter so maybe this isn't possible, but clearly the general public clearly has more interest than we (I) thought. They just don't know how to channel their support effectively.
Maybe we, as the FOSS community, need to start utilizing crowd sourcing more. Maybe we can use the marketing from Heartbleed etc. to launch a Kickstarter to audit OpenSSL, and use the NSA revelations to launch a Kickstarter to run more exit nodes (which are depereately needed -- about 1k nodes for 2M users). The project to audit Truecrypt seemed to reap the benefits of this quite effectively.
I'm not familiar with the TOS for Kickstarter so maybe this isn't possible, but clearly the general public clearly has more interest than we (I) thought. They just don't know how to channel their support effectively.