Head liberators.

To my knowledge they have their techniques to deanonymize people, in a targeted manner, but at its core I don’t believe the protocol is backdoored.

Yeah, if I remember correctly, when the feds took down the Silk Road dude they basically had to hack a server inside the TOR network to serve exploit code that forced the browser to bypass the TOR network. There was a couple of months where everyone was freaking out because there was a sudden influx of people complaining that they were unexpectedly making unsecured requests to some server in langley or something like that.

I’m not even sure if it was a hacked server… I seem to remember them busting a hosting provider popular for TOR servers on the claim of child pornography and then suddenly all the servers owned by that provider began serving up dodgy code.

It’s not so much that they have to get into “a server inside the tor network” but they can go after users of tor hidden services if they somehow track down the server hosting that particular hidden service, but the whole system is built around making that very difficult.

Yes! Hidden services was what I was talking about. It’s been a while. :grinning face with sweat:

Those links you posted were what I was talking about. I know they claimed to have gotten the Silk Road dude over him using the same username, but I remember at the time (along with the timeline of the hack) that it all stank of parallel construction so they wouldn’t have to admit to the hack.

Right? :downcast face with sweat:

The case of freedom hosting, however, is more interesting, as I discussed above.

I mean, the thing about TOR is it relies on its distributed nature to help obfuscate traffic. When you’ve got access to the literal backbone of the internet, as we know is largely kind of the case. See: Room 641A Hunting down the location of a Hidden Service ceases to be an impossible task. Not easy, but no more impossible than spinning up enough of your own exit relays to map synchronous traffic.

jfc, this conversation is becoming a total trip down memory lane. I’m remembering years of arguments during the 90’s with people over whether or not ECHELON was real. brb gotta go build a Faraday cage in the woods.:grinning face with sweat:

True. We’re talking some pretty high end stuff when it’d probably be more akin to that xkcd comic about breaking encryption with a wrench.

lol yep there ya go.

Yeah, I wasn’t trying to say they were the same, merely remarking on the scale of what they have access to. Hiding a needle in a haystack is a great technique, but it’s important to remember our opponents do still pretty much have access to all the hay.

Oh yeah, you’re probably right. If I remember correctly from the Snowden dumps, the Alphabets keep a whole bunch of sweet 0 Days.

What ever happened to debating in the marketplace of ideas?