Re:Yasha Levine: Interview about Tor, spies and the cult of ...
by invid_regent on Sunday October 30, 2016 @12:00AM
(#12828087)
He says in the interview that a global adversary like the NSA just needs to cross index a unique characteristic about yourself to de-anonymize your identity, even if you're using TOR.
This is a perfectly valid claim.
Re:Yasha Levine: Interview about Tor, spies and the cult of ...
by Canada on Sunday October 30, 2016 @12:12AM
(#12828119)
The fact that onion routing cannot resist the global passive adversary is well documented and also publicly acknowledged by the Tor project itself.
This article is garbage. It makes a ton of patently false claims and as well as completely unsupported claims, which are buried in irrelevant political opinion, and on top of that the opinion of the interviewee on Tor is of no consequence.
Re:Yasha Levine: Interview about Tor, spies and the cult of ...
by meddlepal on Saturday October 29, 2016 @10:56PM
(#12827897)
How so? Please explain.
Re:Yasha Levine: Interview about Tor, spies and the cult of ...
by XaYdEk on Sunday October 30, 2016 @06:19PM
(#12832757)
If you use Tor the same way you have used a regular browser there could be an 'image' of your online habits to compare with (not applicable within the darknet).
But if the user doesn't use it in the same way, the likely attack in most cases is traffic correlation. This works by having large visibility over entry nodes and visibilty over the final destination (ex: a website). Given enough activity and time you can by process of elimination deanonimize the user's ip.
I can't even take umbrage with anything that's written here, because the author's basic factual axioms are simply wrong.
EDIT in Reply:
I started fact checking, and I couldn't past the first two paragraphs. It is a work of fiction that, if it occasionally flirts with the truth, does so almost certainly by chance.
Below is my rather unorganized beginning of a fact check:
------------------
I would like to fact check the entirety, but I'm running short on time, so I'll skip his tin-foil hat pre-ramble:
>Tor became a prominent feature of political discourse around the world in 2013 when Edward Snowden popped up on the scene...
False. Tor rose to prominence far prior to leaks, particularly with the Arab Spring and the Silk Road. The first appearance on the front page of the NYT was in 2009 [0] A year prior to the leaks, Foreign Policy named Dingledine et al. to its Top 100 Global Thinkers list.[1] Snowden's sticker didn't start start that fire, although it might have added some fuel.
>I knew about some of the pit-falls and problems of Tor: I knew that if you signed into Google using Tor, it didn't really matter because Google still had all the information about your personal account. The same with Facebook. So Tor didn’t really solve the corporate side of surveillance.
>I knew about some of the pit-falls and problems of Tor: I knew that if you signed into Google using Tor, it didn't really matter because Google still had all the information about your personal account. The same with Facebook.
So Tor didn’t really solve the corporate side of surveillance.
So now, I have to ask. Has this guy just found a way to make a living getting stoned and spouting faux-anarchist nonsense?
Not signing into websites with your real name while on an anonymous service is the 1+1=2 of anonymity. So to remain anonymous, just... don't announce your name. That isn't a "pitfall." That's just common sense.
Around the point at which he was inventing grand conspiracies, particularly through close and perfect action of a monolithic government, I couldn't take it seriously any longer.
[0] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/23/world/middleeast/23censor....
[1]http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/11/26/the_fp_100_...