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Comment by anologwintermut | Hacker News Reader

At least one piece of advise in this article contradicts everything we know about the NSA's abilities: using TOR. Tor, including hidden services. was never designed to protect against someone who could observe all or almost all traffic in the Tor network. Given that data, it's rather easy to correlate timing information. Indeed, Tor fundamentally allows this since it aims to be a low latency network.

Given the NSA's extensive tapping of key fiber lines, we should assume they can actually observe the necessary traffic.

From the paper: "A global passive adversary is the most commonly assumed threat when analyzing theoretical anonymity designs. But like all practical low-latency systems, Tor does not protect against such a strong adversary." --- Tor: The Second Generation Onion Router [0]

[0]https://svn.torproject.org/svn/projects/design-paper/tor-des...

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If you can observe the entry and the exit nodes, Tor is pretty much useless. This is an inherent drawback of low-latency drawbacks and against a powerful global adversary like the NSA, Tor is probably not very effective.

But then, if you look at it, probably nothing is 100% secure ... not even SSL perhaps, but we still use it. I think what he means to say is that the technologies we use to keep us secure may not be 100% foolproof, but still using a HTTPS connection instead of plain-HTTP is better. Of course, this depends on who your adversary is.

In this case, I agree with you -- he should have mentioned this.

Yes, but will you be more easily identified & tracked when connecting through tor, or directly with your own IP? Even when you follow all of his suggestions, you won't have absolute security. The idea is to make surveilling you harder and more expensive.

So if you have the data, de-anonymizing Tor traffic is easy. Your only question is does the NSA care about people using Tor? Well, if we remove people using it to get child porn, i'd imagine an appreciable fraction of Tor traffic is of interest to the NSA. For the most part it's people who think they have somewhere to hide. This includes foreign embassies apparently

So to the NSA, Tor is probably a flag that you might have something to hide. They are probably more likely to look at it than normal traffic.

Put another way, hide in the network should mean hide in the majority of traffic, not some small subset that partially self selects for doing suspicious things.

Agree entirely. I think it hurts his credibility as well.

From my days working at a defence contractor: you should NEVER take security advice from one person.

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