any moment now ...

[John Case]

On Tue, 30 Nov 2010, Eugen Leitl wrote:

>> 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.