Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is why I was flabbergasted by the nonsense internet takeover of HTTPS. You can't cache it. Probably 99% of web traffic is generic public content, but we can't cache any of it, because 1% of it needs to be private. So then people complain "oh but The Illuminati can see what websites I'm going to!" Yeah, and they still can with HTTPS, it's called statistical network traffic analysis. Decades of research papers sho…
Numerous people are currently sitting in jail in Saudi Arabia for having posted tweets critical of the regime under their own names. Without HTTPS, jails around the world would be a lot busier if authorities could see everything that their populace reads online in clear text, in order to build dossiers on who is most likely to be a dissident. I don’t think the kind of traffic analysis you mention works as well as you…
Second, totalitarian regimes around the world don't sit on their hands just because you use HTTPS. If they want to know who a dissident is, they go find out. Bribery, tips, intimidation, torture, spy cameras, facial recognition, etc. They also know that everyone who reads a tweet isn't automatically a dissident.
Third, no, it's not hard at all to do statistical traffic analysis, it's part of basic DPI packages shipped with commercial network gear for about a decade. All you need to identify the user is the destination and the source, and the signature of similar connections to specific hosts with specific traffic. You compare the traffic from the target user to the traffic you monitor or simulate with known destinations and content, and highest probability wins. It's child's play.