If the user's data passes through nodes owned by one entity or their partners in this case NSA, FBI, GCHQ etc, it's going to be quite easy to find the origin IP...
The FBI Identified a Tor User
31–40 of 367 posts
Re: The FBI Identified a Tor User
#32I will never understand people who do illegal things over their own IP. Is it really that hard to find an open access point? Way back in the day when I torrented all my content I used a long-range wifi antenna connected to a public AP and a dedicated PC with a scrubbed drive that never connected to my home network.
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Re: The FBI Identified a Tor User
#33I will never understand people who do illegal things over their own IP. Is it really that hard to find an open access point? Way back in the day when I torrented all my content I used a long-range wifi antenna connected to a public AP and a dedicated PC with a scrubbed drive that never connected to my home network.
So you did illegal things illegally. And who owned the public AP? Someone not as smart as you? You sure?
Re: The FBI Identified a Tor User
#34I wonder if this is going to be confirmation that a large fraction of Tor nodes are in fact run by the FBI.
> The FBI also found what specific pages Al-Azhari visited, including a section on donating Bitcoin; another focused on military operations conducted by ISIS fighters in Iraq, Syria, and Nigeria; and another page that provided links to material from ISIS’s media arm Based on what little I know of SSL, this suggests the server was compromised too? Or does tor do a bad job of certificate pinning? Edit: Or the clients a…
> Based on what little I know of SSL, this suggests the server was compromised too?
Not necessarily.
If a passive snooper knows I used Tor Browser to make an SSL request to en.wikipedia.org and received 987,654 bytes then immediately made a SSL request to upload.wikimedia.org and received 1,234,567 bytes that might be enough information to work out I visited https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Agency.
Re: The FBI Identified a Tor User
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, it isn't. That's not what he was charged for, it's just one piece of evidence in the case: > “From Mr. Al-Azhari’s attempt to acquire firearms through unlawful channels to his desire to provide material support to a designated foreign terrorist organization, it was clear Mr. Al-Azhari’s intention was to carry out an act of violence,” > According to the complaint, Al-Azhari was an ISIS supporter who planned and at…
I’m interested what the case law is for arresting someone for intent to perform a heinous act. I’ve heard a lot from stalking victims and the like that often times police will refuse to do anything until the stalker has assaulted or murdered the victim in question, despite clear indications the stalker is actively planning to do harm.
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Re: The FBI Identified a Tor User
#36I wonder if this is going to be confirmation that a large fraction of Tor nodes are in fact run by the FBI.
My favorite theory is that the US, China, NK, Russia, Israel, et al. are all running a large number of malicious servers, all of which adds up to a secure Tor network, since they'll never cooperate
Re: The FBI Identified a Tor User
#37More troubling - is it a crime to visit a website which begs donations for an illegal cause?
No, it isn't. That's not what he was charged for, it's just one piece of evidence in the case: > “From Mr. Al-Azhari’s attempt to acquire firearms through unlawful channels to his desire to provide material support to a designated foreign terrorist organization, it was clear Mr. Al-Azhari’s intention was to carry out an act of violence,” > According to the complaint, Al-Azhari was an ISIS supporter who planned and at…
You didn't say what he was charged with? He was charged with attempting to materially support a designated terrorist organization.
Re: The FBI Identified a Tor User
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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.
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
Re: The FBI Identified a Tor User
#39Sounds like his box was compromised, possibly by owning the site he visited first. The FBI has done this before - inject a browser exploit into a site they compromised to identify its users.
yep, this, I ran a tor webserver for discussing geopolitics with friends on a pi for a few months before finding it had been compromised.
that was shortly after intel exchange had been taken down.
Tor services just arent secure in any sense imho. especially not from the people who wrote them.
sigh.
Re: The FBI Identified a Tor User
#40Original article this is referencing: https://www.vice.com/en/article/z34dx3/fbi-wont-say-hacked-d... And the relevant court document: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/23569961-motion-to-r...
Direct link to the PDF (because DocumentCloud's web viewer appears to be down): https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/23569961/motion-to-re...
Seems like this is a case of the government saying "trust us". They noted two ways that the feds could have gotten the IP address but how about a third, they targeted the guy and got the IP address from the ISP and said "look!, we found our guy" -occams razor.