Silk Road forums
Discussion => Security => Topic started by: somethinglike on March 05, 2012, 12:12 am
-
Thought this might be of interest to some of you.
http://edition.cnn.com/2011/TECH/web/06/11/hiding.online.identity/index.html
Some of the key quotes:
"The Tor Project operates as a non-profit that receives 75% of its funding from the U.S. government."
"In some cases, volunteers hosting exit relays have been paid a visit by the CIA or FBI."
-
- straight away i wouldn't trust cnn if my life depended on it unless they were reporting on nuclear fallout by which point its already too late.
- i'd assume its an attempt to discredit Tor and hope we stop using it so that they win this war.
"Tor was originally designed, implemented, and deployed as a third-generation onion routing project of the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory. It was originally developed with the U.S. Navy in mind, for the primary purpose of protecting government communications. Today, it is used every day for a wide variety of purposes by normal people, the military, journalists, law enforcement officers, activists, and many others. "
-
It is a strange twist of fate though we're now using a system originally funded by the US Navy.
-
TOR was actually created by the US military as a way to keep their data secure when in foreign locations. The reasons why it was made doesn't stop it from working.
-
the internet also:-
"The origins of the Internet reach back to research of the 1960s, commissioned by the United States government in collaboration with private commercial interests to build robust, fault-tolerant, and distributed computer networks. The funding of a new U.S. backbone by the National Science Foundation in the 1980s, as well as private funding for other commercial backbones, led to worldwide participation in the development of new networking technologies, and the merger of many networks. The commercialization of what was by the 1990s an international network resulted in its popularization and incorporation into virtually every aspect of modern human life. As of 2011, more than 2.1 billion people — nearly a third of Earth's population — use the services of the Internet."
- towns have started due to the military presence which would otherwise have been uninhabited....
- plenty more examples....there was a need and the foundation was laid...
-
Another example would have to be the number of times the US/UK have either directly or inadvertently funded regimes post WW2 with weapons or arms technology to nations they later went on to be hostile to. Plenty of irony when it comes to government.
In the case of TOR what's interesting is that the very bodies that would be keen to monitor domestic usage,
are the ones who understand its infrastructure the best.
Like any other anonymous network, TOR can never be 100% secure, and it always pays to be aware of any weaknesses. If it's true that volunteers hosting exit relays have had visits from the feds, that does change the picture slightly.
-
This is not a real disadvantage!
The TOR network is worth billions to the US government in political capital! It's a way of extending their soft power across the world (100k Iranians access the TOR network) and for their agents across the world to relay information anonymously from any internet access point.
They will never sacrifice TOR, even if they could do it, in order to displace the Silk Road. It does not make political or economic sense.
There are dramatically more malicious entities using TOR than us. There are genuine terrorists, child molester communities and much much worse on here too.
At this point, TOR is as much 'part of the government' as the Internet is part of the 'DARPA program'. Not very, although there's some truth to both.
tldr; even if they tried to manipulate TOR into busting everybody, we would hardly be the first in line by a long stretch.
Addendum: Bearing everything I've just said in mind, it behooves us to also pay heed to kmfkewm's thought that you cannot necessarily depend on the Government to behave rationally. In some respects, governments behave as rational, coherent entities, but there are circumstances, not uncommon, in which they act in a dream-like state, almost unconsciously. Much of the evils that Government do, they do so completely unaware of their actions and the consequences. In particular, you find this in those areas that the Government tends to be reactive. They often dramatically undershoot or overshoot when implementing judicial reforms or police operations. The larger the Government, the more bizarre the occurrences. Roads that lead literally nowhere into the desert, multi-billion dollar spacecraft left to rust as giant garden ornaments at Cape Canaveral, secret projects to which the government no longer supports or understands, but they labor on since one department forgot to tell the other. You couldn't make it up. Sometimes I watch and think they have Alzheimer's disease.
-
You also need to keep in mind that the DEA doesn't give a shit about Iranians but does give a shit about SR. Yes the concepts for Tor came from the USA Navy. Tor wasn't implemented by them though, it was implemented by someone who worked for NSA prior to implementing it though. It gets a significant amount of funding from the U.S. government. People who run exit nodes have been raided by various agencies, from federal police to intelligence.
-
kmf what's your opinion on keeping the TOR program updated?
-
You should keep all programs updated when security flaws are fixed in the newer versions at least
-
In some cases, volunteers hosting exit relays have been paid a visit by the CIA or FBI
Because someone hacks something or downloads child porn from honeypot and guess what IP address is in logs? Not the originating address but the Tor exit nodes IP address. The rest is straightforward.
I never heard of any case when LEA was able to follow and reconstruct the Tor circuit. So the Tor main goal works 100%.
The governments worldwide uses Tor to protect their own communications. Some did it in wrong sense, like those leaked e-mails from sniffing exit node couple of years ago.
-
- i would go so far as to say there are Tor project derivatives :-
1. team of developers to constantly update tools and their version of what comes out the Tor project
2. come up with newer ways of hacking the Tor client software and relays/exit nodes.
3. ..siphon off information to continually update their intel on us Tor "users".
- so although there may not be regular busts their job is to pass as regular buyers and sellers...and pick 'n choose who they should go after..
- and this is not taking into account the constant flow of info that most likely from LE posing as sellers/buyers..