One must wonder...

Story: Facebook Creates .Onion Site; Now Accessible Via Tor NetworkTotal Replies: 3
Author Content
Bob_Robertson

Nov 04, 2014
9:47 AM EDT
How does this aid the NSA's snooping?
penguinist

Nov 04, 2014
11:25 AM EDT
Obviously, it gives the NSA access to the connectivity matrix of the Tor network.

And that's the piece that gives (gave) Tor its anonymity.
caitlyn

Nov 04, 2014
12:05 PM EDT
Tor anonymity was never what is was cracked up to be. It's been reported repeatedly that if you used Tor that made it far more likely that the NSA would look at you more closely. The Tor website has long warned that it's anonymity was limited at best. Law enforcement have always been able to track people through Tor. An onion router (what Tor is) and a proxy only make that process more difficult. It's enough to stop casual snooping. It probably is enough of a pain that data harvesters who are looking to sell information about you for marketing purposes won't bother. The NSA and other, similar government efforts in other countries aren't stopped by Tor. They are hardly even slowed by it.
fnoss

Nov 06, 2014
6:13 PM EDT
@caitlyn

I'm sorry Caitlyn, but your comment above is unknowing at best, misinformation at worst. Unfortunately, the result is the same. You spread ignorance.

>>"Tor anonymity was never what is was cracked up to be. It's been reported repeatedly that if you used Tor that made it far more likely that the NSA would look at you more closely. "

It does not matter the slightest how good you think Tor is at stopping the state from looking at you. It doesn't even matter if they look harder as a result. The point of using tor is to make it much more expensive to invade peoples privacy. Tor is **very** good at doing that. if everyone is using tor, it would be horrendously more expensive, perhaps even impossible to monitor the populous.

In fact, let me rewrite your statement above to emphasize what I'm saying.

"Women's rights arguments were never what they were cracked up to be. It's been reported repeatedly that if you used those arguments it made it far more likely that nasty male bigots would suppress women more"

I doubt that's the way you further women's rights is it, by suggesting that making arguments is a bad thing? If its not, then it is also not the way to further the fight for privacy respecting technologies either.

>>"The Tor website has long warned that it's anonymity was limited at best. Law enforcement have always been able to track people through Tor. An onion router (what Tor is) and a proxy only make that process more difficult."

I have no idea where you get the idea law enforcement can track people using tor? and always?? Are you referring to tracking people that access normal websites with Tor? Or people accessing onion sites? Or how about those who use Tor through the tails distro? Do you even know the difference?

Also, tor is made up of 3 privacy respecting parts. *Proxy *Routing *Encryption. What do you mean by "running tor through a proxy? it is one! If you are referring to running tor through a 3rd party proxy, then I would ask why you trust that 3rd party?

>>"It's enough to stop casual snooping. It probably is enough of a pain that data harvesters who are looking to sell information about you for marketing purposes won't bother."

On this point you are factually correct. But framing tor as if it is easy to circumvent is just plain wrong. Sure, if the NSA is looking at you, I doubt there is anything that could stop them. But again, they have to spend almost infinitely more money to target lots of individuals then they do by just intercepting plain text data.

>> The NSA and other, similar government efforts in other countries aren't stopped by Tor. They are hardly even slowed by it.

How in the world would you know that? Do you work for the NSA, GCHQ? do you know their circumvention technologies? can they now break encryption as quickly as they can collect plain text data passively, at the same expense?

I think not!

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