On Mon, 29 Nov 2010, Justin Bull wrote:

On Mon, Nov 29, 2010 at 3:01 PM, John Case wrote:

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... and wikileaks will be officially classified as a terrorist organization.

I am curious as to how Tor operators will be viewed in all of this ... as ISPs or as material accomplices ?

I wouldn't be surprised if it didn't take too long before Wikileaks became a very interesting target to the US gov't and her allies. I don't think Tor operators will get too much flak in terms of personality or MO, but this exposure may cause disruptions to the project.

Tor has been in LEA (FBI++) sights for a long time now - just as the remailer system was under heavy scrutiny before it. I have zero doubt that the fedz run many nodes. //Alif -- "Never belong to any party, always oppose privileged classes and public plunderers, never lack sympathy with the poor, always remain devoted to the public welfare, never be satisfied with merely printing news, always be drastically independent, never be afraid to attack wrong, whether by predatory plutocracy or predatory poverty." Joseph Pulitzer, 1907 Speech

On Mon, 29 Nov 2010, Justin Bull wrote:

On Mon, Nov 29, 2010 at 5:56 PM, J.A. Terranson wrote:

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Tor has been in LEA (FBI++) sights for a long time now - just as the remailer system was under heavy scrutiny before it. I have zero doubt that the fedz run many nodes.

As a beginner in the crypto field, I thought Tor was actually quite secure. Seeing that is not the case, what is regarded as a safe, anonymous browsing practise? And, as far as I know, monitoring an exit node only reveals the destination address, not the sender... Is that really a security issue?

Certainly, however, that's not something Tor is really designed to mask - Tor is designed to mask the people requesting services via Tor. While Tor is likely quite secure in most respects, good intelligence does not necessarily require that the content of any request be known: there are many facets to any communication, and things like the existence of a particular target is certainly usable intel. Tor is designed to inhibit a number of attacks, including traffic analysis, but there is *no* absolute guarantee that every possible attack is known, or even just coded for. If your life relies on anonymity services, you will likely be a whole lot more careful than if it's seen as something you "merely provide to others on extra bandwidth". //Alif -- "Never belong to any party, always oppose privileged classes and public plunderers, never lack sympathy with the poor, always remain devoted to the public welfare, never be satisfied with merely printing news, always be drastically independent, never be afraid to attack wrong, whether by predatory plutocracy or predatory poverty." Joseph Pulitzer, 1907 Speech

On Mon, 29 Nov 2010, John Case wrote:

On Mon, 29 Nov 2010, J.A. Terranson wrote:

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...

I am curious as to how Tor operators will be viewed in all of this ... as ISPs or as material accomplices ?

Likely as a co-conspirator. This way, grand juries (who have zero clue to start with, and even less after the dog and pony show by the prosecutor) its easier to get warrants to go fishing on any domestic Tor participant. Thousands of potential "terrorists" for the price of a single subpoena :-(

Running a Tor node that is easily traceable back to your own real world identity is, I think, very foolish.

Unfortunately, the Tor mailing list is full of people running them from their residential Internet connection or their college dorm room.

Agreed. I also know of at least two rather large exit nodes (>3mbps) being run under actual identities. Foolish, but common. It is very unfortunate that many people don't really understand what it is they are undertaking in providing anonymity services. //Alif -- "Never belong to any party, always oppose privileged classes and public plunderers, never lack sympathy with the poor, always remain devoted to the public welfare, never be satisfied with merely printing news, always be drastically independent, never be afraid to attack wrong, whether by predatory plutocracy or predatory poverty." Joseph Pulitzer, 1907 Speech

On Tue, 30 Nov 2010, Eugen Leitl wrote:

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run under actual identities. Foolish, but common. It is very unfortunate that many people don't really understand what it is they are undertaking in providing anonymity services.

I don't get it.

What they are undertaking is an unpredictable, unlimited future liability. Even without anything interesting, like packet inspection, or state inspection, it's easy to assume that all Internet traffic is logged somewhere - just connection logs and so on - a trivial amount of data to save, and gets more trivial every six months when bigger drives come out. So _today_ your actions might be benign, and tomorrow they might also be benign, but what about next year or next decade or ... When you have a permanent record of all of your transactions in Internet-space, it's just a matter of time before that is mined for something that you never intended, and much like selling stocks short, your risk here is unlimited. Unlike selling stocks short, your risk never expires. Remember - the bolsheviks went back to old storerooms of 30 year old slips of paper, long forgotten, even by the Tsars themselves, and picked through them, page by page, decades later, to find out who to murder. Don't run a Tor node under your own name, or traceable back to yourself with simple traffic analysis, even in "sane" countries.

On Tue, 30 Nov 2010, Eugen Leitl wrote:

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Even without anything interesting, like packet inspection, or state inspection, it's easy to assume that all Internet traffic is logged somewhere - just connection logs and so on - a trivial amount of data to save, and gets more trivial every six months when bigger drives come out.

So _today_ your actions might be benign, and tomorrow they might also be benign, but what about next year or next decade or ...

In a society that far gone this only raises the stakes of armed resistance. Fight or flight are both perfectly preferable to playing sitting duck, waiting for black vans to pick you up.

Look, if running a Tor node anonymously was difficult, this conversation would be interesting. But unning a Tor node anonymously is trivial, so the cost/benefit analysis is pretty parabolic. No cost, all benefit. Unless you're actually part of the project, or a public supporter, etc., there is no reason to have your identity attached to Tor in any way.

Hi Eugen, On Tue, 30 Nov 2010, Eugen Leitl wrote:

On Tue, Nov 30, 2010 at 08:57:31PM +0000, John Case wrote:

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Look, if running a Tor node anonymously was difficult, this conversation would be interesting.

But unning a Tor node anonymously is trivial, so the cost/benefit analysis is pretty parabolic. No cost, all benefit.

This is interesting to me personally. How would you run a Tor node anonymously, without breaking the bank?

Apart from offshore incorporation or finding a host that takes cash or anonymous prepaid cards it appears not obvious.

There's a few ways to approach this. First, there are a LOT of co-location/vps/webhost resellers operating in the US, and almost no regulation of them as "ISPs". The big famous ones that do shell hosting and irc and all of that will not work - they are very vigilant about customer validation because they get so much CC fraud. But if you can find a joe-blow VPS reseller or datacenter reseller and call them up like any other vendor, they will bend over backwards to take your money. They're not going to ask for your drivers license or a credit check or anything like that. You can just mail them a postal money order or two and be done with it. Most give you a discount for paying a year in advance, so that's convenient. The other way to approach it is much more convenient, but potentially more risky, and that is to use an assumed name with your own credit card. You will find that most CC auths are done based on the numbers, and not on your actual name. Try it - you can set up a working amazon account with your own CC and a totally bogus name. Since most (all ?) merchants are required by their banks to dispose of the CC information, or never hold it in the first place after authorization, after your transaction they are left with your bogus information (but correct address) and either a hash or the last four of your CC. This is worth considering, since we aren't guarding against "being raided right now", but rather against future data mining ... and if future data mining traces an IP back to an account that had (possibly) the same address as you ... it gets a bit hazy there. The hunt is for a name, and that name is not there. So that's some food for thought - I have it on good authority that all of the above works very well ... and we haven't even gotten to prepaid visa cards, which aren't exactly rocket science to procure and use...

On Thu, 2 Dec 2010, StealthMonger wrote:

So, what can be done with that Tor node once it's set up? It can't be used interactively (i.e. with low latency) because that "permanent record of all of your transactions in Internet-space" can be used today or tomorrow or "next year or next decade or ..." to correlate packet timings and destroy whatever anonymity the Tor node might otherwise have had. And if the Tor node is configured to respond to instructions anonymized by a remailer network, the remailer network might as well have by used by itself in the first place, without the Tor node in the picture at all.

Oh - a very interesting question, and something I didn't think of, for reasons I will expain now ... You see, if you have the ability to set up an anonymous Tor node, then you wouldn't be using Tor _yourself_. By definition, Tor usage is only for people that can't safely set up their own Tor node. Make sense ? If you are running a Tor node, you're doing it for altruistic reasons - for people that have an immediate, right now need for privacy, and need to tweet the next meet-up spot, future risk be damned. You, yourself, on the other hand, do not need this - you're a rich, well educated computer savvy type that can set up all kinds of interesting infrastructure for yourself and defeat the threat model I am talking about - not with Tor, but with (insert interesting privacy architecture here). If you can run your own Tor node anonymously, you've got tunnels within tunnels, exiting at random points around the world ... right ? Right.

On Wed, 1 Dec 2010, coderman wrote:

you can load up to $500 without difficulty. you pay a $5 or so fee per card; avoid anything that charges percentages loaded. you have a year to use it, usually, before fees start whittling down the balance.

you can register the cards on-line with privacy preserving billing detail. be sure to consider country/state of billing address if this matters for your purchase. (note that Tor is not the only anonymous option for this :)

once registered with card holder name, address, use as you would any other Visa/MC/Amex...

http://www.simon.com/giftcard/

On Mon, Nov 29, 2010 at 11:18:00PM +0000, John Case wrote:

Running a Tor node that is easily traceable back to your own real world identity is, I think, very foolish.

In saner places it's ok.

Unfortunately, the Tor mailing list is full of people running them from their residential Internet connection or their college dorm room.

Shouldn't be a problem, in saner places. -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE

On Thu, Dec 02, 2010 at 01:27:41PM -0800, coderman wrote:

On Mon, Nov 29, 2010 at 12:01 PM, John Case wrote:

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... and wikileaks will be officially classified as a terrorist organization.

if this did happen, a more interesting question is what happens to the US citizens who are or would be providing material support to Wikileaks. (you may not remain a US citizen, for example :)

I'm quite looking forward to what will happen when I have to take a transatlantic flight the next time. Not that I intend to, but one can never know. -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE