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I have an acquaintance that's a mid-to-high level FBI agent. In casual conversation, he's eluded on more than one occasion that the government is able to track

I have an acquaintance that's a mid-to-high level FBI agent. In casual conversation, he's eluded on more than one occasion that the government is able to track people using TOR. I believe his exact words were "we've gotten pretty good at it." At this point, I just assume the government knows about everything I do online.

jpalomaki 5y ago
Regular surfing via TOR is so painful (due to captchas from Cloudflare and others) that the proportion of "suspicious" traffic must be quite high in the network.
- tga_d 5y ago
  There have been studies that show this isn't true -- any particular session from a Tor exit relay is about as likely to be malicious as a session from a random IP, and the most popular sites accessed are things like Amazon and Facebook (the latter of which makes up approximately 50% of onion service traffic, as of ~4 years ago). I, for one, use Tor for most web browsing that doesn't involve logging in. (As a hint for people who dislike captchas: I don't actually see them as often any more, but for static content in particular, you can fall back to archive sites to circumvent them.)
c7DJTLrn 5y ago
The Five Eyes have a debugger attached to the entire western Internet. It's not unthinkable :)
tga_d 5y ago
I suspect they are exaggerating, or that the claims were misunderstood. Yes, the FBI can find criminals who use Tor, but with extremely few notable exceptions from many years ago now, that isn't done by breaking any of Tor's protections, but instead using more traditional police investigation methods (e.g., "we got a tip this person is up to something, and this account only ever posts when that person is at home..."). We know this because details of investigations are public once they go to court in the US. Yes, parallel construction is a thing, but the idea that they regularly make use of exploits and this information never gets leaked in any sort of verifiable way (even with FBI agents who are apparently willing to speak of such secret programs with mere acquaintances ;)) means we can be relatively confident that, if such exploits do exist, they are rare enough to be too expensive to waste on anything but the most extreme circumstances. In other words, no, the FBI does not know what you're doing on Tor (assuming you're not at the far end of a bell curve, and ignoring everything other than what Tor protects).

jpalomaki 5y ago

Regular surfing via TOR is so painful (due to captchas from Cloudflare and others) that the proportion of "suspicious" traffic must be quite high in the network.

tga_d 5y ago
There have been studies that show this isn't true -- any particular session from a Tor exit relay is about as likely to be malicious as a session from a random IP, and the most popular sites accessed are things like Amazon and Facebook (the latter of which makes up approximately 50% of onion service traffic, as of ~4 years ago). I, for one, use Tor for most web browsing that doesn't involve logging in. (As a hint for people who dislike captchas: I don't actually see them as often any more, but for static content in particular, you can fall back to archive sites to circumvent them.)

c7DJTLrn 5y ago

The Five Eyes have a debugger attached to the entire western Internet. It's not unthinkable :)

tga_d 5y ago

I suspect they are exaggerating, or that the claims were misunderstood. Yes, the FBI can find criminals who use Tor, but with extremely few notable exceptions from many years ago now, that isn't done by breaking any of Tor's protections, but instead using more traditional police investigation methods (e.g., "we got a tip this person is up to something, and this account only ever posts when that person is at home..."). We know this because details of investigations are public once they go to court in the US. Yes, parallel construction is a thing, but the idea that they regularly make use of exploits and this information never gets leaked in any sort of verifiable way (even with FBI agents who are apparently willing to speak of such secret programs with mere acquaintances ;)) means we can be relatively confident that, if such exploits do exist, they are rare enough to be too expensive to waste on anything but the most extreme circumstances. In other words, no, the FBI does not know what you're doing on Tor (assuming you're not at the far end of a bell curve, and ignoring everything other than what Tor protects).