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Law Enforcement Undermines Tor

marx.wtf

61–70 of 86 posts

Re: Law Enforcement Undermines Tor

#61

Are there any projects that generates random traffic? Like a website where you have it open it keeps sending random traffic. It will make traffic analysis very hard.

It is already hard with bots drowning any legit traffic, and you want to add random traffic too.

Re: Law Enforcement Undermines Tor

#62
post #51
post #8

I have suspected Tor has been busted for quite a long time. LE is only using this power selectively for now - the last thing that they want is to scare users away lest they go and build something more secure. The Nym mixnet[0] seems promising but it's still new and unproven. I had an idea a while back to make traffic analysis more difficult by building circuits distributed across adversarial countries. Would like to…

The public tends to have a very strange idea as to a lot of things on this topic while forgetting that TOR itself was actually a department of defence project or NSW I forget originally. If you’re interested in seeing what the next generation of this stuff looks like (although AFAIK is not really known outside of defence contracting circles) take a look at this https://github.com/tst-race/race-docs/blob/main/what-is-…

> The public tends to have a very strange idea as to a lot of things on this topic while forgetting that TOR itself was actually a department of defence project or NSW I forget originally.

IIRC it was a US Navy project. But I didn't understand your point.

Re: Law Enforcement Undermines Tor

#63

It's not directly mentioned in this article, but the four deanonymized users were admins of a CSAM site with hundreds of thousands of users. If you're concerned about being targeted by law enforcement, step one is probably: don't be that. https://www.dw.com/de/darknet-missbrauchsplattform-boystown-... https://www.sueddeutsche.de/panorama/kindesmissbrauch-boysto...

Cool, we got the “if you don’t have anything to hide” argument out of the way early.

Now we can discuss the actual privacy implications of this news

Re: Law Enforcement Undermines Tor

#64
post #10

[flagged]

It’s 2024 and I can’t tell if this is sarcasm or not.

Then allow me to knock it up a notch!

Encryption isn't needed, because nothing important happens over the internet.

Nobody shops online, or does their banking online. Nobody would ever work from home over the internet - how would the boss know if workers were sleeping on the job? People who want to buy stocks from their phone simply phone their stockbroker. Anyone can post any nonsense on the internet, so it's useless for any serious research. Dating online, where anyone can lie about anything? I hardly think that's likely.

The idea that a control system for an important bit of infrastructure like a power plant would be connected to the internet? A car with a driver assistance system getting software updates over the internet? Utterly inconceivable.

A pandemic that shifts almost the entire economy and almost all socialisation online? I doubt that would ever happen. In my society, we cover our mouths when we sneeze, and wash our hands after using the bathroom.

Just look at the most valuable companies, that have driven the growth of the economy over recent decades. Apple, Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, Amazon, Facebook, Netflix. If there's one thing they have in common, it's that they're absolutely nothing to do with the internet.

The internet is, at its heart, nothing more than a chatroom for shut-in losers to talk about pokemon - so there's no need for anything online to be private.

Re: Law Enforcement Undermines Tor

#65
post #62
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The public tends to have a very strange idea as to a lot of things on this topic while forgetting that TOR itself was actually a department of defence project or NSW I forget originally. If you’re interested in seeing what the next generation of this stuff looks like (although AFAIK is not really known outside of defence contracting circles) take a look at this https://github.com/tst-race/race-docs/blob/main/what-is-…

> The public tends to have a very strange idea as to a lot of things on this topic while forgetting that TOR itself was actually a department of defence project or NSW I forget originally. IIRC it was a US Navy project. But I didn't understand your point.

NSW = Naval Special Warfare but yes somewhere within the alphabet soup that is US natsec

Re: Law Enforcement Undermines Tor

#66
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah that's all fun, I don't have anything to hide either. But what if I actually WILL in the future, retroactively? I've said a few things here and there, what if certain types of speech end up getting banned and if you don't remove it on time (or lost access), you risk jail-time? Seems far away, but it's literally happening in England. Please watch out with this kind of thinking - it's dangerous to everyone.

> what if certain types of speech end up getting banned and if you don't remove it on time (or lost access), you risk jail-time? So racism, homophobia, and transphobia? Why would you support technologies that promote and support the dissemination of hate speech and misinformation?

because they are based

Re: Law Enforcement Undermines Tor

#67
post #65
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The public tends to have a very strange idea as to a lot of things on this topic while forgetting that TOR itself was actually a department of defence project or NSW I forget originally. IIRC it was a US Navy project. But I didn't understand your point.

NSW = Naval Special Warfare but yes somewhere within the alphabet soup that is US natsec

But, apart from that, I don't understand your point about it being a military project.

Re: Law Enforcement Undermines Tor

#68

It's not directly mentioned in this article, but the four deanonymized users were admins of a CSAM site with hundreds of thousands of users. If you're concerned about being targeted by law enforcement, step one is probably: don't be that. https://www.dw.com/de/darknet-missbrauchsplattform-boystown-... https://www.sueddeutsche.de/panorama/kindesmissbrauch-boysto...

Cool, we got the “if you don’t have anything to hide” argument out of the way early. Now we can discuss the actual privacy implications of this news

Are you discussing the privacy implications? It looks like your only comment is this asinine middlebrow dismissal. Meanwhile, I've given actionable advice.

Re: Law Enforcement Undermines Tor

#69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plenty of people still believe that using a VPN + Tor means they are “private”. What we need to teach others is that this is no longer the case - privacy is not a one size fits all solution. You may be private from other users on your network, but not nation state actors.

VPN/Tor provide something else anyway: anonymity. Privacy is a different thing. You can lead an entirely private life in an environment where everyone knows who you are and who you interact with. They just don't know how you are interacting with those people. Most people don't need anonymity most of the time...

Really curious on your definition of private here because I have a buttload of evidence that says that is entirely untrue and you can as a private citizen buy detailed demographic and location data at an easily identifiable level for people without even needing to talk to another person.

Re: Law Enforcement Undermines Tor

#70
post #67
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NSW = Naval Special Warfare but yes somewhere within the alphabet soup that is US natsec

But, apart from that, I don't understand your point about it being a military project.

People don't understand Federal entities aren't monolithic. Even within a single agency, you'll have teams doing both offensive (Red Team), and defensive (Blue Team) work.

People think that just because the research came out of the Navy, it was busted or compromised from the start, which it wasn't. Efforts only spun up to wrangle it in from being an academic curiosity once it started being heavily noticed as being a frequent tool/vector in investigations of criminal/adversarial activity.

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