[splunk]

Q: Should we trust Tor?
A: No. Do NOT trust Tor with your anonymity.

Tor users often make a big deal of the fact that the NSA admits in its own internal documents that Tor makes surveillance more work-intensive for them. What these proponents fail to acknowledge
is that the spies at the NSA also worry that Internet users will abandon Tor. Reason is:

“A critical mass of targets use Tor. Scaring them away from Tor might be counterproductive”

Tor is a signal to spies, a big waving flag that gets their attention
and literally draws them to your network traffic. Certain aspects of Tor might be hard to trace, but ultimately the NSA wants people to keep using Tor. This highlights the fact that security services, like the FBI, have developed sophisticated tools to remove the veil of anonymity that Tor aims to provide.

For example, the Washington Post reports:

“One document provided by Snowden included an internal exchange among NSA hackers
in which one of them said the agency’s Remote Operations Center was capable of
targeting anyone who visited an al-Qaeda Web site using Tor.”

It’s well known that Tor is susceptible to what’s called a traffic confirmation attack (AKA end-to-end correlation), where an entity monitoring the network traffic on both sides of a Tor session can wield statistical tools to identify a specific communication path. Keep in mind that roughly 90 percent of the world’s internet communication flows through the United States, so it’s easy for U.S. intelligence to
deploying this approach by watching data flows around entry and exit points.

SOURCES:
Spoiler (Click to View)1 Cooper Quintin, “7 Things You Should Know About Tor,” Electronic Frontier Foundation, July 1, 2014,
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/07/7-...-about-tor

2 'Tor Stinks' presentation, Guardian, October 4, 2013,
http://www.theguardian.com/world/interac...n-document

3 J. Appelbaum, A. Gibson, J. Goetz, V. Kabisch, L. Kampf, L. Ryge, “NSA targets the privacy-conscious,”
http://daserste.ndr.de/panorama/aktuell/...age-1.html

4 Kevin Poulsen, “FBI Admits It Controlled Tor Servers Behind Mass Malware Attack,”
Wired, September 13, 2013, http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/09...sting-fbi/

5 Barton Gellman, Craig Timberg, and Steven Rich, “Secret NSA documents show campaign against Tor encrypted
network,” Washington Post, October 4, 2013

6 James Ball, “NSA stores metadata of millions of web users for up to a year, secret files show,” Guardian,
September 30, 2013, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/se...documents/
print

7 Maxim Kammerer, [tor-talk] End-to-end correlation for fun and profit, August 20, 2007,
https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/t...25254.html

TL;DR: Don't keep your eggs in one hand basket. Mix up your setup, Don't rely on Tor.

If you EVER need help with anonymity, pm me

[ThrobinHood]

Nice post man always worth a read :)

[Hunting Rifle]

This is what they wont you think. They know that the stupid people will sill use it, and they don't care about them. They want you to move over. They can't crack tor.

What do you say about this OP?

[splunk]

This is what they wont you think. They know that the stupid people will sill use it, and they don't care about them. They want you to move over. They can't crack tor.

What do you say about this OP?

Of course they can't "crack" or even "stop" Tor. Your identity has potential to be leaked or intercepted while using Tor, however, and they have the technology to do this.

[Jake Miller]

Of course they can't "crack" or even "stop" Tor. Your identity has potential to be leaked or intercepted while using Tor, however, and they have the technology to do this.

Wrong Tor is indeed crackable. Their bounty just isn't big enough for the major hackers to even think about trying to crack tor.

[logging*machine]

Tor is 3 layered, and the routers they use is constantly changing, the only thing they could potentially get from Tor is the data they send over

[splunk]

Wrong Tor is indeed crackable. Their bounty just isn't big enough for the major hackers to even think about trying to crack tor.

It's not "hackers" they're worried about.

terrorism groups, fraudsters, hitmen, drug lords, weapons traffickers.

hackers are the least of their worries

[ThrobinHood]

Ye for those who say its unbreakable just read their blog https://blog.torproject.org/

[Omniscient]

IMHO if you need TOR to hide your activity then you're likely doing something maybe you shouldn't be in which case you're not safe. You're only truly safe when you're not doing things you shouldn't be.

But to speak directly about TOR being unsafe for use because of the NSA. I don't believe TOR can be trusted simply because anyone can setup a node. For all anyone knows the NSA might control dozens or even hundreds of nodes.

[Light Yagami]

IMHO if you need TOR to hide your activity then you're likely doing something maybe you shouldn't be in which case you're not safe. You're only truly safe when you're not doing things you shouldn't be.

But to speak directly about TOR being unsafe for use because of the NSA. I don't believe TOR can be trusted simply because anyone can setup a node. For all anyone knows the NSA might control dozens or even hundreds of nodes.

I think you just nailed it!
I never trusted tor either, but wasn't sure how to put it.

peace

FFO

[Machiavellian101]

IMHO if you need TOR to hide your activity then you're likely doing something maybe you shouldn't be in which case you're not safe. You're only truly safe when you're not doing things you shouldn't be.

But to speak directly about TOR being unsafe for use because of the NSA. I don't believe TOR can be trusted simply because anyone can setup a node. For all anyone knows the NSA might control dozens or even hundreds of nodes.

Tor was once used by the military. There's obviously a reason they no longer use it don't you think?

Furthermore it's been know to be exploited before.

[Jay‌]

IMHO if you need TOR to hide your activity then you're likely doing something maybe you shouldn't be in which case you're not safe. You're only truly safe when you're not doing things you shouldn't be.

But to speak directly about TOR being unsafe for use because of the NSA. I don't believe TOR can be trusted simply because anyone can setup a node. For all anyone knows the NSA might control dozens or even hundreds of nodes.

You are exactly right in the sense that anyone can setup a node. However you can take certain steps in helping to prevent yourself from being exploited through a form of a honey pot node.

I agree however that true safety will only ever be obtained when you are doing something that doesn't go against any form of written law.

However, there are plenty of people who do use TOR as a means of ensuring their privacy. People who have no fear of the law, but rather a government who believes it can track, collect, and store our data without any limitations under the excuse "if you have nothing to hide then it shouldn't be a problem".

At the end of the day, if you are doing something illegal you run the risk of getting caught. People need to understand this before doing anything. It is part of being an adult and making a conscious decision. Every action has the potential to have consequences.

Using TOR is surely no different.

[Machiavellian101]

If you are doing anything illegal it's only a matter of time before you get caught anyway. You can't realistically commit illegal acts online without setting digital footprints for yourself.

[Jay‌]

If you are doing anything illegal it's only a matter of time before you get caught anyway. You can't realistically commit illegal acts online without setting digital footprints for yourself.

Technically speaking you could.

It is sort of like the 1% out of 99% though.

[Machiavellian101]

Technically speaking you could.

It is sort of like the 1% out of 99% though.

I guess that's what many criminals thought until they got caught.