gye-44

"State actors"?

This is implying that over 190 countries have that capability, and it is available to all "state" organizations. Like so many comments on HN, saying that it offers "0 anonymity", this shows ignorance of what is going on in the rest of the world, and the kind of surveillance the world's population is under.

Further above, Five Eyes were mentioned. From the Snowden leaks it is known that some eyes get assistance for sacrificing all data upstream to NSA, but its not like all participants have equal access. So even claiming that "any" "Western" "state actor" has that capacity sounds far-fetched.

Also, this is ignorant of all the non-state actors interested in your data.

Your ideas are correct but not easy to do. Browse the Anonbib and you will see lots of designs being discussed over what is now more than 30 years of research. Yes, Tor favors usability, also since previous attempts at safer systems were never adopted by enough users (Mixmaster, Mixminion).

Already lots of people pick less safe options because "Tor is too slow". If you make it slower, you lose users, and everyone loses anonymity. That's only part of the answer and not the only argument against some of the changes proposed.

I highly recommend the original design paper. [1] It touches on the very valid suggestions you make, and the tradeoffs. Sadly, not much has changed since. If you have a valid proposal, and you double-checked briefly what is covered on Anonbib as previous considerations, post to the tor-dev list and it will be looked at by Tor developers. At least that is my experience from following that list.

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