The FBI Identified a Tor User

Re:The FBI Identified a Tor User by kmeisthax on Tuesday January 17, 2023 @09:19AM (#34412623)

I would not be surprised given that Tor was specifically created to anonymize the traffic of US spies. It was released to the public to give plausible deniability to the spies. A new protocol that ONLY spies used would be obvious to track down, no matter how much encryption it had. But if everyone is using it for different purposes then you have to actually have to break the encryption to know if someone's using Tor to check in with the CIA or if they're just so paranoid that they insist on surfing Wikipedia with it.

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Re:The FBI Identified a Tor User by paulluuk on Tuesday January 17, 2023 @09:35AM (#34412815)

After reading Edward Snowden's autobiography (Permanent Record, great read), I feel like Tor, end-to-end encryption and similar solutions/products are basically a dagger through the heart of intelligence services. As such, I find it hard to believe that they knowingly gave the public such tools. And if they did, it sure as hell backfired on them.

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Re:The FBI Identified a Tor User by h4n1 on Tuesday January 17, 2023 @09:44AM (#34412930)

If they run enough nodes to deanonymize users, it's a dagger through the heart of other intelligence services, but an absolute blessing for the NSA

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Re:The FBI Identified a Tor User by frankfrankfrank on Tuesday January 17, 2023 @10:22AM (#34413469)

Hmmm almost like whoever has a head start and unlimited finances and resources due to being the reserve currency could have done exactly that.

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Re:The FBI Identified a Tor User by sweetbitter on Thursday January 19, 2023 @04:46PM (#34446082)

For very obvious reasons you don't need to run any nodes, craft any malware, or scrutinize a target's layer 3+ OPSEC, in order to break Tor. You simply go to tier 1 ISPs and buy up IP datagram headers going to/from entry nodes and you win. The only solution is a constant rate of fake traffic to the guard node.

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Re:The FBI Identified a Tor User by CyanBird on Tuesday January 17, 2023 @09:58AM (#34413123)

BBC which is run by BritishIntel Services, one of the very first things that they did when the war in Ukraine exploded was to set up many new TOR nodes

But yeah, TOR is certainly a double edged sword, but I am led to believe that they assess that it's offensive capabilities to pierce against Anglo-Oligarchy enemies offsets the drawbacks it produces on how they themselves deal with homefront dissidents

My take is that, well, yeah, that's one of the benefits of having overwhelming power and capabilities, that they can afford to take one or two punches in the nose, if that means that they will beat the ever living shit out of their actual enemies

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Re:The FBI Identified a Tor User by Jerrrry on Tuesday January 17, 2023 @10:50AM (#34413942)

As long as Ukraine exists, the Darknet has free roam to proliferate with US's half-baked OKAY'ing.

It is sharpest triple-edged sword in modern intelligence existence.

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Re:The FBI Identified a Tor User by zrwalt on Tuesday January 17, 2023 @10:04AM (#34413223)

Why? Snowden said they do traffic anaylsis on everyone, including phone calls. They find you via other means if you are not extremely careful like Snowden himself.

Discussion about these issues has been stifled since critics like Assange and Applebaum have been smeared (but not prosecuted) with sex charges and Greenwald is being depicted as a conspiracy theorist.

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Re:The FBI Identified a Tor User by GuB-42 on Tuesday January 17, 2023 @10:14AM (#34413349)

It is not a "dagger to the heart", it is something they have to take into account.

What makes things harder for them makes it harder for the enemy, and vice-versa.

If anything, maybe it will help intelligence services realize that gathering intelligence is only half of the job, keeping secrets is the other half. Well, maybe they already realized it and we are not aware of that (it means it worked). But at the time of Snowden's leaks they failed big time. While most people focused on the content of the leaks and arguing about whether Snowden is a hero or a traitor, what I mostly saw is a guy who managed to break the security of the NSA. If a single guy can do that, what about trained spies backed by world power gouvernements? I guess countries like Russia and China already knew everything there was to know about the NSA. I could go for some "master plan" conspiracy theory, but my guess is just that the NSA is incompetent, or at least it was at the time of Snowden. Maybe that "dagger to the heart" is more like a wake up call, I hope for them.

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Re:The FBI Identified a Tor User by kibwen on Tuesday January 17, 2023 @10:19AM (#34413425)

Tor was developed by the US Navy. The military understands how crucial encrypted messaging is, and doesn't particularly care whether or not it's a dagger through the heart of other TLAs. In a bureaucratic battle between the military and domestic intelligence agencies, the military wins.

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Re:The FBI Identified a Tor User by cheese_van on Tuesday January 17, 2023 @10:49AM (#34413920)

And additionally funded by the US State Department to provide anonymity for users seeking political expression in countries where that expression may be dangerous.

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Re:The FBI Identified a Tor User by kevin_thibedeau on Tuesday January 17, 2023 @11:06AM (#34414199)

The State dept happily encouraged the use of broken cryptography machines in the past. They don't have a clean record on transparency.

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Re:The FBI Identified a Tor User by marcus0x62 on Tuesday January 17, 2023 @10:50AM (#34413951)

E2E and onion routing are potentially problematic -- if they aren't compromised by the government. When controlled by the government, they can lull the targets of government surveillance into a false sense of security. For instance, the government-run Anom[0] network that was completely compromised, but claimed E2E encryption. I wouldn't exactly call it a dagger through the heart of government sigint activity.

0 - https://www.pcmag.com/news/fbi-sold-criminals-fake-encrypted...

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Re:The FBI Identified a Tor User by sobkas on Tuesday January 17, 2023 @01:46PM (#34416803)

> After reading Edward Snowden's autobiography (Permanent Record, great read), I feel like Tor, end-to-end encryption and similar solutions/products are basically a dagger through the heart of intelligence services. As such, I find it hard to believe that they knowingly gave the public such tools. And if they did, it sure as hell backfired on them.

I have heard it somewhere but using Tor or end-to-end is like using armoured car to transport money between park bench and cardboard box. If someone wants you compromised, you will get compromised, it only matters how many resources they are willing to throw at you. And for average person, it's not a lot. So best way is to blend in. And using Tor, end-to-end, VPN(full of people with something to hide, it would be stupid not to infiltrate or honeypot) will make you stand out, you might even peek someone's curiosity. Not a very healthy way to operate on the Internet...

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Re:The FBI Identified a Tor User by sweetbitter on Thursday January 19, 2023 @04:47PM (#34446101)

> If someone wants you compromised, you will get compromised, it only matters how many resources they are willing to throw at you.

Wants who compromised? What are they going to do against people who use no pseudonym and never originate from the same machine or the same physical location?

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