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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."
It cuts both ways.
You can use a knife for cooking, mugging or for police action.
But the more problematic criminals are also the ones that are most likely to be aware of this and be careful with what and who they trust.
And the most careful persons in organized crime have sometimes only been relying on trusted messengers that have been doing all their communication. That to avoid wiretaps.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
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.
Policemen eat food, and so do criminals! In a shocking discovery today we learned that a completely ambivalent object such as food could be used for good and for evil. Some fringe elements speculate that food in fact has no innate bias towards good or evil, and in fact does not exert any influence over the person that uses it apart from keeping them alive. But we all know that since it's rumored that TERRORISTS (tm) have been known to occasionally eat, food is obviously evil and should be banned. The fact that law enforcement officers have been spotted eating once in a while (especially in the vicinity of doughnut shops) should not allow us to forget about this lurking evil we call food. In fact, the world would be a better place if it were banned entirely.
Warning! If you are sarcasm impaired, the above paragraph may cause you to become angry. Breathe slowly and try to relax. If you cannot relax after a few minutes, you might need professional help. Sarcasm may be the lowest form of wit, but it is wit nonetheless.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
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?
If you do choose to report it, be sure to report it in an anonymous manner. The reporter will be the first suspect, and the easiest mark for a conviction.
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.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I have thought for some time that privacy is the next killer app. The person who solves the privacy problem will make a stack of money.
"... there's no way in hell you could EVER know what the entire body of law"
This is where jury nullification comes in. But they don't like that much either!