I'm an idealist.  So instead of looking for ways to circumvent government restrictions, I continue to advocate the abolishment of all governments.

shadysaint wrote:

I'm an idealist.  So instead of looking for ways to circumvent government restrictions, I continue to advocate the abolishment of all governments.

That's very unlikely to happen in our lifetime because, eventually, after abolishing all governments and leaving everything "free", on people's hands, some group, which now could come from anywhere in the world, would seize the opportunity and soon there would be a government again everywhere, because the idea is already on the collective's mind and there's much to be gained by being the government — even if you need to do it by force, which would probably be easier without the military, currently controlled by the governments. Or the military would become the government, as it has happened before in some countries. Or huge corporations would become the government. Or a smaller but stronger group would do it and force their way down on people's throats just like the governments we now have do. So, maybe the best we can have is a government that isn't so meddlesome.

The way people using TOR get caught by the FBI is not through weaknesses in TOR. It's because the FBI use profiling techniques combined with surveillance to track people down. One example I read about involved a hacker who spent a lot of time on certain IRC channels. The FBI were unable to trace him because he used TOR correctly, so they sat silently in the channels and read everything he posted. Over about 6 months he mentioned in passing a few key facts, in particular he talked about how irritated he was with a particular event taking place, blocking all the roads around him (giving them his city). Even without him letting that slip, they had narrowed it down to a list of a couple of cities using timezone and weather that he mentioned.

They also analysed his speech patterns to get a profile of his age, race, educational background, and a bunch of other stuff. Over time they narrowed the search area down to about a three-block radius, and then they started local surveillance on the few properties in that area where people matching his profile lived. They monitored the internet connections of those properties to see when people connected and disconnected to/from TOR, and correlated those with the times the hacker in the IRC channel connected. That left them with one person.

So the moral of the story is - if you want to be a criminal, TOR isn't enough to keep you safe. If you want to talk or browse in private, it is.

Last edited by Blahah (2012 September 17, 5:51 am)

undead_saif wrote:

I've searched about the topic before (wanted to enter the deep net (warning: save yourselves the headache and don't read about it) because I wanted (and still do) to check what I can find of forbidden books there), though I didn't find reliable sources for this, I read on several different forums that there's no complete anonymity and any IP can be tracked down if the FBI really wants to, although that's still difficult and they can't go around tracking everybody except for child pornography producers and users and drug dealers.

And thanks for the rest, good to know that other methods exist to obtain anonymity, I will indeed check them out some time later.

As the others said, it is theoretically very possible to have complete anonymity, though in practice each one of these networks has their own technical vulnerabilities. Tor in timing attacks (Seeing packets from A to B, then B to C, implies A is connected to C) and of course just watching the data transferred. i2p in possibly the same way, I'm not to familiar with it.

Freenet (my favourite, though fairly limited until it reaches critical mass) is the strongest of the three, though apparently still has an attack vector that threatens it's unique plausible deniability known as the "pitch black attack" yet to be completely fixed. And as Richard said, all three are vulnerable to social engineering and/or behavioural analysis if you're sloppy.

As far as encryption goes, none of these are entirely secure, they're just strong enough to make it very impractical even for governments to try and crack them without using quantum computing. The only encryption method proved to be completely uncrackable is the one time pad, which is for obvious reasons not really implementable for such networks...