From a stupid simple persec POV Tor buys you time... to make a run for
   it... or whatever.
   That's the best you can ever hope for. Use the time wisely.
   Revolutionaries are dead men on furlough, and so are whistle-blowers.
   Rr
   On 06/06/2016 05:25 PM, Steve Kinney wrote:

     On 06/06/2016 02:47 PM, juan wrote:
     > On Mon, 6 Jun 2016 18:23:17 +0000 (UTC) jim bell
     > [1]<jdb10987@yahoo.com> wrote:
     >>
     >> Apparently there are a number of easy-to-describe improvements
     >> which could be made to the TOR protocol, such as increasing the
     >> number of hops, generating fake extra traffic, etc, which would
     >> improve it greatly.  TOR is a net positive,
     > Or let's try this :
     > Tor is a crass example of controlled opposition. No doubt
     > controlled opposition is a net positive...for the establishment.
     > And so it must be a net negative for the opposition.
     Since nobody asked, here's a description of why neither TOR nor any
     other existing or presently planned anonymizing protocol I know of
     can
     be relied on to conceal a user's identity from the Five Eyes or any
     of
     several other hostile actors.  I surface this concept every year or
     so, but so far nobody seems interested in discussing it.  Maybe it's
     just too discouraging to think about.  No matter who created it or
     why, TOR and similar mix networks are at best security theater,
     relative to top tier State adversaries.
     Quoting myself from an earlier post:
     Anonymized routing protocols are designed to defeat passive
     observation and limited traffic manipulation by hostile actors.  But
     what if an effectively unlimited number of compromised routers,
     subject to realtime observation and internal manipulation, were
     available to hostile actors?  Game over, I think.
     About 15 years ago I used online traceroute utilities and whois
     lookups to determine (roughly) where all the high performing
     Mixmaster
     remailers were physically located.  Over half of them, including
     most
     with "exotic sounding" TLDs, were apparently in the state of Texas.
     Then I used my data to construct "hard to compromise" chains,
     routing
     Mixmaster messages through national jurisdictions not likely to have
     comprehensive data sharing between their security services, and
     started sending test messages.  None of these test messages ever
     made
     it back to me.
     So I concluded that, despite its major technical superiority to
     other
     anonymized networking protocols, the Mixmaster network was most
     likely
     compromised by passive observation (one owner for a majority of
     reliable remailers) and active intervention (traffic between
     uncontrolled remailers interrupted in transit).
     Owning enough of the routers in an anonymizing network to negate its
     security is largely a question of money:  How much budget to you
     have,
     how certain do you want to be that nobody is really anonymous?
     If I had to neutralize an anonymous routing network, my approach
     would
     be to set up a cloud server running thousands of instances of the
     router software in question, customized to facilitate monitoring by
     a
     hypervisor.  Each of these routers would be connected via VPN to a
     unique remote host, which would function as a transparent proxy.
     The
     proxy hosts could be machines owned by "friendly" actors, rooted
     consumer grade routers, purpose built appliances, conventional
     Windows
     botnets or some combination of these.
     I have not seen this method of attack described and named; I call it
     a
     "hydra" attack, because one body, many heads.  I think this mode of
     attack deserves competent attention (i.e., not by me) because
     realtime
     observation and manipulation of any desired quantity of routers
     would
     provide solutions to any distributed anonymous routing protocol.
     The only defense I can think of is to assure that message traffic
     passes back and forth between mutually hostile national
     jurisdictions
     before delivery.  This would be a bit of a hairball to implement,
     lots
     of slippery variables and potential counter-actions by hostiles
     would
     have to be taken into account.  But this approach could increase the
     cost and reduce the reliability of Hydra attacks against anonymizing
     protocols.  Somewhat.  Probably not enough for "life safety"
     application
     s.
     Long story short:  If you want to be /really/ anonymous in the
     presence of hostile State sponsored actors, do not rely on a
     software-only approach:  Use physical security measures to conceal
     your identity from the physical router that connects you to the
     Internet, because most or all of the anonymizing routers your
     traffic
     passes through may be owned and controlled by the very people you
     are
     hiding from.
     :o/

   >

References

   1. mailto:jdb10987@yahoo.com