How Tor Helps Both Dissidents and the Police

Al writes "Technology Review has a in-depth article about the anonymous networking software Tor and how it is helping dissidents spread information in oppressive regimes such as Syria, Zimbabwe and Mauritania, and opening up the unfiltered web for users in many more countries. In China, for instance, the computers found in some web cafes are configured to use Tor automatically. Interestingly, some police agencies even use the software to hide their activity from suspects. As filtering becomes ever more common in democratic countries such as the US, perhaps Tor (and similar tools such as I2P), will become even more valuable."

Comments

Great article but

[island_earth]

I'd like to see a discussion of the legal ramifications of letting your system be used as a Tor relay. Suppose I volunteer some of my home network capacity to Tor.

Putting aside the fact that it's probably a violation of my broadband provider's agreement to share my connection in this way, what if someone uses Tor for kiddie porn and happens to make the final connection to the police honeypot (so to speak) from my IP address?

If anyone can point to a good discussion of this, it would be great. I'd like to let my system be a relay for Tor, but the risk seems large.

Is TOR really make web surfing anonymous?

[ogrisel]

I always wondered whether it is not possible to attack TOR with statistical analysis provided you can dedicate significant resources to it. Suppose you are a big brother-style government agency with many computers and bandwith pipes dedicated to your goals. Could you not register a significant amounts of output and intermediate nodes (like say 10% of all nodes) that are specially improved to cooperatively log output HTTP traffic along with various web services session cookies, headers and originating IP addresses in a centralized DB and then use statistical analysis to identify the candidate source IP addresses of suspicious HTTP traffic?

Re:Is TOR really make web surfing anonymous?

[ogrisel]

So it is actually dangerous to market TOR to non tech savy people who do not systematically check that they are surfing only on https websites or orther encrypted protocols. I guess you can harvest a great amount of passwords and other sensitive data by sniffing the http traffic of a single exit node.

Re:Fine Line

[Hatta]

As long as the police arrest more people for having Cannabis than they do all violent crimes combined, they ARE the criminals. The police victimize more people than they protect. It's that simple.