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Tor is considered as good as anything. After all, if you suspect the feds control a lot of tor nodes you probably also suspect they’ve infiltrated or outright

Tor is considered as good as anything. After all, if you suspect the feds control a lot of tor nodes you probably also suspect they’ve infiltrated or outright own the major VPNs; that they’ve got special access to the major cloud providers, and that they’ve got backdoors in things like TPMs and remote management agents. Of course Tor has its problems - exit nodes with trash IP reputations, unreliable hidden services, evil exit nodes and suchlike. So it’s certainly not perfect.

wolverine876 3y ago
> Tor is considered as good as anything. By who? It's an important question for someone taking this advice. One drawback of Tor is that it attracts attention to you.
127361 3y ago
Team Cymru claim to be able to trace through VPNs using widely collected flow records from Internet core routers. ISPs sell these flow records to third parties. So the whole fabric of the Internet itself is one giant spy machine, in effect. That sounds like is like it's straight out of dystopian fiction, but no, it's for real. https://www.vice.com/en/article/jg84yy/data-brokers-netflow-data-team-cymru https://www.vice.com/en/article/jg84yy/data-brokers-netflow-...
- AlexandrB 3y ago
  I wonder if stuff like this can be thwarted by having a constant flow of encrypted junk traffic between two parties - only replacing the junk with real data (but not changing the volume) when they're actively communicating. Obviously, this doesn't scale for something like social media. But metadata regarding one-on-one conversations using something like Signal could be effectively obscured.
  - 127361 3y ago
    Trouble is it's so difficult to know what your adversary is doing, it's better to switch to a different medium i.e. reduce dependence on the Internet (as I detailed in another post). The fundamental nature of the Internet itself permits this behavior to go unchecked, there is no way for a user to know what is happening behind the scenes with certainty. We send out our private information (search queries, etc.) into this giant black box we have no control over. That's the crux of it. That was not the case with radio or satellite TV, the ability to determine what people were listening to or watching on a mass scale was nearly impossible due to the laws of physics. As the system was completely receive-only.
ta_9390 3y ago
> also suspect they’ve infiltrated or outright own the major VPNs ExpressVPN, PIA, Cyberghost, Zenmate, Intigo, and other major VPN providers are owned by ex-undercover commando in Israeli military Teddy Sagi of Kape Technologies. It is safe to assume Israel and US are actively using them as honeypots, especially they were mostly acquired - not built - by Kape.

wolverine876 3y ago

> Tor is considered as good as anything. By who? It's an important question for someone taking this advice. One drawback of Tor is that it attracts attention to you.

127361 3y ago

Team Cymru claim to be able to trace through VPNs using widely collected flow records from Internet core routers. ISPs sell these flow records to third parties. So the whole fabric of the Internet itself is one giant spy machine, in effect. That sounds like is like it's straight out of dystopian fiction, but no, it's for real. https://www.vice.com/en/article/jg84yy/data-brokers-netflow-data-team-cymru https://www.vice.com/en/article/jg84yy/data-brokers-netflow-...

AlexandrB 3y ago
I wonder if stuff like this can be thwarted by having a constant flow of encrypted junk traffic between two parties - only replacing the junk with real data (but not changing the volume) when they're actively communicating. Obviously, this doesn't scale for something like social media. But metadata regarding one-on-one conversations using something like Signal could be effectively obscured.
- 127361 3y ago
  Trouble is it's so difficult to know what your adversary is doing, it's better to switch to a different medium i.e. reduce dependence on the Internet (as I detailed in another post). The fundamental nature of the Internet itself permits this behavior to go unchecked, there is no way for a user to know what is happening behind the scenes with certainty. We send out our private information (search queries, etc.) into this giant black box we have no control over. That's the crux of it. That was not the case with radio or satellite TV, the ability to determine what people were listening to or watching on a mass scale was nearly impossible due to the laws of physics. As the system was completely receive-only.

ta_9390 3y ago

> also suspect they’ve infiltrated or outright own the major VPNs ExpressVPN, PIA, Cyberghost, Zenmate, Intigo, and other major VPN providers are owned by ex-undercover commando in Israeli military Teddy Sagi of Kape Technologies. It is safe to assume Israel and US are actively using them as honeypots, especially they were mostly acquired - not built - by Kape.