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Comment by jacques_chester | Hacker News Reader

Most of the time, when a stern announcement is made about how We Will Catch You, they try to hint that they have magical cryptography-busting powers.

All BS, of course. Most such people are charged because Customs open a percentage of all packages entering the country and have a look inside. And it's not necessarily at random; the method for reliably fooling a good sniffer dog has yet to be devised.

Until someone solves the problem that you can't easily do dual key encryption on molecules, people are going to keep getting busted by old fashioned customs and police work.

If he made a mistake, it wasn't some Tor-related misconfiguration. It's that he didn't bribe the right Customs officials.

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> the method for reliably fooling a good sniffer dog has yet to be devised

It is indeed surprisingly hard to make an airtight container. A ziploc bag doesn't work. Even setting your drugs in a block of concrete does not work. What does work is enclosing that block with a layer of melted lead and letting that cool down. Of course that might be suspicious in other ways (and expensive).

But to install Tor and then leave such evidence behind on your PC screams of gross negligence. They obviously confiscated his electronic devices and were easily able to identify his SR account and various postings.

Had they not found that, would they have a case if they could only prove someone was sending him drugs in the mail?

I don't think having Tor installed would prove, beyond reasonable doubt, that you did anything.

Having thousands of SMSes discussing what drugs you have for sale might be a bit harder to explain.

No I think they saw his posts on the forum, then contacted him pretending to be a customer or the guy just blabbed when they picked him up. He's not exactly a master criminal I'm sure he told them his user name and everything which is why he got such a low sentence

> Most such people are charged because Customs open a percentage of all packages entering the country and have a look inside.

Oh, so I could get someone arrested by blatantly mailing them drugs? Surely a court would require proof the receiver initiated and intended the drugs to be shipped.

No. You might squeak past on reasonable doubt.

But if you have unexplained bundles of cash, some drugs, a bunch of weapons and two mobile phones with thousands of messages discussing drug discussions then you might be SOL.

Yep. Though you may eventually be found not guilty by the courts when there is no other evidence around that still doesn't mean the prosecutor won't try to invent evidence, like finding out you used Tor once upon a time through your ISP logs, or something else minor they will blow up to make you look like Scarface.

Also you'll have to spend a huge amount of money on a lawyer, and most likely will be refused bail so could languish in pretrial prison for a year or so.

That's why you never sign for anything if you don't know what it is, in court they claim because you signed for it you ordered it

Good points. Though Tor exit nodes can be run by or run under the surveillance of governments.

SR is .onion you don't use exit nodes to get to it. The only way they could get you by running infrastructre is if they controlled enough entrance and internal nodes they could do a timing attack, especially with SMF telling the world when everybody is logged in but why bother, everybody just eventually drops dimes on themselves through massive opsec violations like this one guy who announced the tiny town he lived in and that "cops will never suspect my packages because the place is so small" /facepalm. He's probably the only Tor user for 100 miles

Tor Metrics estimates around 5000 users within Australia, which means that there's probably a very good chance that he is not the only Tor user in his area.

https://metrics.torproject.org/users.html?graph=direct-users...

Australia is kinda big. 5000 users is ~593 square miles per Tor user.

The Australian population is heavily urbanised. Averaging the population over the landmass leads to silly conclusions.

I would imagine these sites would also run SSL making this point moot.

.onion sites don't need SSL as Tor traffic itself is already encrypted.

Ahh, I didn't understand how they worked; I thought exit nodes were still necessarily used.

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