How confidential are the names of Tor's sponsors?

Question

There was a recent thread on the main board in which someone asked for information about one of Tor's sponsors:

What is SponsorR?

Everything I could find about Tor's sponsors on the wiki omitted their actual names, and Jens' response on the thread mentioned that "...sometimes sponsors don't want to be assigned with their name."

With these in mind, I was wondering what the policy is regarding revealing sponsor's names in the public boards? Should we refrain from doing so, even if the name isn't confidential? Or is this not something we should worry about? (i.e. If a name of a confidential client gets leaked somehow, they have no legal recourse against the Tor project anyway.)

Just wondering.

Answer 1

If you look at The Tor Project as whole you'll see that nearly everything happens in the open. The specification, the code, discussions, meeting notes, financial documents etc. is available via the main web site or some subdomain like https://trac.torproject.org/ or https://lists.torproject.org/.

As I discussed in the answer to the SponsorR question also all the data and planning regarding the sponsor happens in the open. So if you now read the financial reports closely, you'll find the clear names of the sponsors. Now you can apply some logic and research and will probably collate sponsor pseudonyms with the clear names.

However I'd consider it a bad style to do so. Because we should ask ourselves what do we gain from that knowledge? Right we know what organizations funded Tor. We can just have a look into the financial report. The only thing which is missing is the information about who funded what. On the other hand: If someone chooses to publish the information about who funds what, I suspect that one or another funder might get upset. In the end this organisation can decide to not fund Tor in the future. So harm is done.

If someone reveals or tries to reveal a sponsor name here in Tor's Q&A page, I'd consider it off-topic and tend to close the question. However I'm keen to know what the broader community thinks here.