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It goes the other way too, as revelations have come out about NSA network siphon implants at AT&T and Verizon (and a person can assume if they are on those net
by wstuartcl 8y ago
It goes the other way too, as revelations have come out about NSA network siphon implants at AT&T and Verizon (and a person can assume if they are on those networks snooping traffic they are on all meaningful interconnects). You can greatly reduce the amount of hard inserts in the entry and exit nodes required for many of these attacks if you have access to the streams of traffic before and after the nodes that you do not control. Even with the padding projects on Tor I would bet pretty hard money that today, and for the last 2-5 years tor has effectively provided 0 anonymization benefit (against state actors) to its users. Now if you are asking does it provide such benefits to users against other parties that are not as well placed or funded -- I think that is a hard yes.
But like most other things related to tradecraft, I doubt we will know the true case for decades (if ever). I mean there were rumblings that NSA had siphons in major pops for 20 years before it was confirmed -- and you could not count how many times people that stated that belief over the years were looked at with suspicion/disbelief.
- gye-44 8y ago"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.
- wstuartcl 8y agoIf you want to be pedantic, then lets clarify my statement that: given anonymity requires that your identity is not known by any other entity and given that it is known that at least one state actor has known ability to inspect/siphon much of the traffic around the world either directly or through data sharing and given the ability to inspect traffic at such locality and breadth allows for unique attack vectors to tor which greatly reduce the need to park/own ingress or egress nodes It is highly likely that there is no (0) implied guarantee of anonymity for any specific user on Tor.