TOR - Open Source Intelligence Gathering.

jits

22 March 2011

Creators of TOR:
David M. Goldschlag <goldschlag[at]itd.nrl.navy.mil>Michael G. Reed <reed[at]itd.nrl.navy.mil>Paul F. Syverson <syverson[at]itd.nrl.navy.mil>Naval Research Laboratory

From: Rebecca Jeschke <rebecca[at]eff.org>Date: 23 March 2011 21:29
Subject: Fwd: Re: Fwd: The onion TOR network
To: A

Hi A. This is from Senior Staff Technologist Seth Schoen. Thanks – Rebecca

-------- Original Message --------

Subject: Re: Fwd: The onion TOR network
Date: Wed, 23 Mar 2011 11:15:24 -0700
From: Seth David Schoen <schoen[at]eff.org>To: Rebecca Jeschke <rebecca[at]eff.org>CC: chris <chris[at]eff.org>, Peter Eckersley <pde[at]eff.org>,
Seth Schoen <schoen[at]eff.org>Rebecca Jeschke writes:

any thoughts on this?

It's totally true that the military people who invented Tor were
thinking about how to create a system that would protect military
communications. The current iteration of that is described at

https://www.torproject.org/about/torusers.html.en#military

right on the Tor home page.

However, the Tor developers also became clear early on that the
system wouldn't protect military communications well unless it had
a very diverse set of users. Elsewhere in that same e-mail
discussion, Mike Perry (a current Tor developer) alludes to this:

https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-talk/2011-March/019898.html

In fact, the best known way we have right now to improve anonymity
is to support more users, and more types of users. See:

http://www.freehaven.net/doc/wupss04/usability.pdf
http://freehaven.net/~arma/slides-weis06.pdf

The first link is to a paper called "Anonymity Loves Company", which
explains the issue this way:

No organization can build this infrastructure for its own sole use.
If a single corporation or government agency were to build a private
network to protect its operations, any connections entering or
leaving that network would be obviously linkable to the controlling
organization. The members and operations of that agency would be
easier, not harder, to distinguish.

Thus, to provide anonymity to any of its users, the network must
accept traffic from external users, so the various user groups can
blend together.

You can read the entire (ongoing) discussion about government funding
for Tor development via

https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-talk/2011-March/thread.html

(search for "[tor-talk] Iran cracks down on web dissident technology").

–

Seth Schoen
Senior Staff Technologist schoen[at]eff.org
Electronic Frontier Foundation https://www.eff.org/
454 Shotwell Street, San Francisco, CA 94110 +1 415 436 9333 x107</schoen[at]eff.org></pde[at]eff.org></chris[at]eff.org></rebecca[at]eff.org></schoen[at]eff.org></rebecca[at]eff.org></syverson[at]itd.nrl.navy.mil></reed[at]itd.nrl.navy.mil></goldschlag[at]itd.nrl.navy.mil>