Not that I think the Fed's would blow their cover to hunt down people buying drugs but still seems stupid to trust.
The list of all relays is public knowledge by design. There’s contact information attached to relays. The big operators are known individuals and organizations. They contribute. Interact.
Which ones are actually the governments doing bad things against their citizens? It’s hard to tell? Then why do you make such claims?
Relays that observably do bad things are removed from the network all the time. Are those ones the government? Tor seemingly has a reasonable handle on the situation if that’s the case.
If the fed is doing correlation attacks, why would they run relays at all? “Just” tap the IXPs near major hubs of relays. Or heck, get data from the taps you already had. Silent and more widespread.
Pushing people away from tor potentially makes it even easier to deanonymize them, depending on the adversary model assumed.
Beyond a principled stance re communications, I can’t think of a reason to use it. If you’re planning to resist some regime that controls telecom infrastructure, the fact that you’re using it is both uncommon and notable.
I know because I work there. AMA (edit: about tor. Because people say a lot about it without actually knowing much. But now I should put my phone down so… too late!)
To protect our most sensitive communications and vulnerable communities , Tor usage should be normalized so it is common and not notable.
I got to travel to Canada, Mexico, and Europe (from the US) for tor meetings and privacy-enhancing technology conferences.
More or less every single cell that goes through the tor network today is prioritized and scheduled by the cell scheduler I wrote.
Edit: I finally found it![0] I had to go to Donate, Donation FAQ, "Can I donate my time?" , "Learn more about joining the Tor community.", and then "Relay Operations" -> "Grow the Tor network" at the bottom right. I would really hope there's a more direct path than this...
https://community.torproject.org/relay/
Thanks for considering to run a relay.
For your AMA, if you want: How's the job? What keeps you working there? How's patriotism these days?
At least for the teams I have been on and my view of leadership, there is very little political talk.
But patriotism isn’t politics… lol. The higher you get the more “hoo rah America!” is a part of the motivational speech or report or whatever. Down here in the streets it’s just another job. Pride in the country isn’t much of a driver. At least for me.
These two statements make little sense together. It was originally developed by the Navy. Okay. So why would they design it from the get-go with such a fatal flaw that would risk their own adversaries gathering "actionable intelligence" from it?
I'd like to stress if we're talking about the Navy's involvement, then you're questioning the design of the whole thing from the very beginning, not just the current implementation.
Thanks for pointing this out. Seems obvious in retrospect but I don't really recall seeing a lot of evidence for this despite seeing the claim quite commonly. That said, the use of "rarely" makes me wonder what evidence has been presented in such rare instances. Just curious. (Of course it's also fine if the phrasing was just communication style.)
The point is if you cannot assure anonymity with 100% certainty, you are simply setting people up.
i had thought the tor browser ships with noscript preinstalled.
Given that a lot of law enforcement doesn't even bother with the low hanging crimes, the chance of them prosecuting anyone using Tor is extremely low unless you get big enough or go far enough to warrant the attention.
Edit: Never does, exit nodes are not part of the circuit, thanks to commenter below.
Completely.
Exits aren’t a part of the circuit. Ever.
If “deanonymize” strictly means perform a timing attack using info you have from the beginning and end of the circuit, then by definition you’re correct.
But if you visit an identifying set of websites and/or ignore TLS errors or … they can still deanonymize you.
Ignoring TLS errors might mean you’re ignoring the fact your exit relay is MitM attacking you.
I always assumed if you were doing things where your threat model included governments trying to kill you that Tor wouldn't be all that useful even if it was secure.