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Comment by henryaj | Hacker News Reader

Depressingly, the document talks about plans to make Tor less reliable to dissuade people from using it:

> Could we set up a lot of really slow Tor nodes ... to degrade the quality of the network? > Given CNE access to a web server make it painful for Tor users?

At least the document seems to confirm that GCHQ has a really, really hard time de-anonymising Tor users.

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I'm pretty sure Tor does smart peer profiling/selection to optimize for throughput. Lots of people run Tor relays on their silly little home DSLs and Tor still works.

Which is why the slide also talks about reporting as if being a high throughput node. i.e. Report back that you're handling a lot of traffic quickly while handling traffic very badly. Does Tor have protection against a node doing that?

I'm pretty sure Tor profiles against this as well. There's a presentation somewhere on YouTube addressing just this problem.

At the end they debate whether killing Tor would be bad, since if they could exploit it they'd have all the "bad guys" in one place.

But then the last slide has this:

> Critical mass of targets use Tor. Scaring them away from Tor might be counterproductive.

If anything this just encourages me to keep my non-exit relay up as much as possible.

This could be countered by setting up a lot of fast nodes. Stealthier malicious nodes that selectively drop or tar-pit traffic though would be harder to fight...

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