This is fairly obvious. From the NSA's perspective, people that act like people who have something to hide are more likely to be hiding something. I'd be surprised if they didn't take it into account.
And this is why we should (and we should encourage everybody we can to) regularly do the most mundane of browsing using TOR.
I'm making a personal effort to use TorBrowser whenever I have some trivial need to use a government website. I suspect I'd stop short of applying for a visa via TOR, but I'll happily look up my local state or federal politicians and their websites, or renew my car registration, or any of the other day-to-day things - in much the same way as I always choose to use BitTorrent for fully legal purposes when available - sure, we all know that 99% of Torrent traffic is copyright infringement, but at least _some_ of it is me grabbing the latest Ubuntu/Raspbian/GameOfThones (no, wait, not that last one...)
If you are a big Tor user, I hope you consider donating bandwidth to help offset your usage. Recently they made an announcement that they were short on relay nodes.
Also, if you don't want to run a node on your home network/machine http://cloud.torproject.org/ makes it ridiculously easy to set up one on EC2 (for as little as ~$3/month)
A: No. If law enforcement becomes interested in traffic from your exit relay, it's possible that officers will seize your computer. For that reason, it's best not to run your exit relay in your home or using your home Internet connection.
Instead, consider running your exit relay in a commercial facility that is supportive of Tor. Have a separate IP address for your exit relay, and don't route your own traffic through it.
Of course, you should avoid keeping any sensitive or personal information on the computer hosting your exit relay, and you never should use that machine for any illegal purpose.
What part of "Should I run an exit relay from my home?" was unclear? I am not trying to discourage people from supporting the tor network, quite the opposite actually. I want to make sure they are fully informed and support tor in a manner that is sustainable.
I'm running one of these on my free EC2 account and can attest to the ridiculously easy part. It took me < 5 min to setup. If you want to avoid paying any fees, just have to make 1 change to the torrc file bandwidth settings. Also, make a great ubuntu sandbox to play with. For example, I'm running a joomla test server with it.
I also am running a Tor relay on EC2, and I was under the assumption that I wouldn't have to worry about charges with a stock install. Can you provide more detail about what I should do to my instance to prevent charges?
Edit your your /etc/tor/torrc
And change the AccountingMax line to:
AccountingMax 3000 MB
This will reduce the monthly usage to 12GB and keep you under the 15GB limit. I've been running this bridge for a few months now and have never gone over.
What is the current number of Tor nodes? What's to say that all tor nodes are now monitored? It's possibly a smaller task than storing all voice calls etc.
It might seem a smaller task in terms of needed servers but your suspicion fails with the simple fact that anyone can add a relay to the network and thus counter the surveillance. I run a non-exit node on every webserver I got because it's cheap and feels good.
You don't need to run all of the exit nodes. If a group controls even 10% of the exit node bandwidth, then they have access to 10% of the traffic and can do major analysis. Even if you use end to end encryption (as in https), than with 10% of the endnote bandwidth, they would see the entry and exit of 1% of all packets, and can (probably) correlate them (with timing) to associate the incoming and outgoing. And if you use tor regularly, then every time either your entry or exit node changes, they get another 1% dice roll.
A: Tor (like all current practical low-latency anonymity designs) fails when the attacker can see both ends of the communications channel. For example, suppose the attacker controls or watches the Tor relay you choose to enter the network, and also controls or watches the website you visit. In this case, the research community knows no practical low-latency design that can reliably stop the attacker from correlating volume and timing information on the two sides.
So, what should we do? Suppose the attacker controls, or can observe, C relays. Suppose there are N relays total. If you select new entry and exit relays each time you use the network, the attacker will be able to correlate all traffic you send with probability (c/n)2. But profiling is, for most users, as bad as being traced all the time: they want to do something often without an attacker noticing, and the attacker noticing once is as bad as the attacker noticing more often. Thus, choosing many random entries and exits gives the user no chance of escaping profiling by this kind of attacker.
The solution is "entry guards": each Tor client selects a few relays at random to use as entry points, and uses only those relays for her first hop. If those relays are not controlled or observed, the attacker can't win, ever, and the user is secure. If those relays are observed or controlled by the attacker, the attacker sees a larger fraction of the user's traffic — but still the user is no more profiled than before. Thus, the user has some chance (on the order of (n-c)/n) of avoiding profiling, whereas she had none before.
You can read more at An Analysis of the Degradation of Anonymous Protocols, Defending Anonymous Communication Against Passive Logging Attacks, and especially Locating Hidden Servers.
Do you just want them to store more? Because using tor to renew your car registrations seems like an obvious way to connect some dots.
If that's all, then I salute you!
Yeah - both store more, and have an archive of obviously non-intelligence relevant encrypted/TOR traffic. I like to think that one day someone will have burn gigawatts of cpu/gpu power subverting the TOR network and breaking TLS/SSL, only to discover I'd been looking up what day the recycling bins are next collected in my local area.
More to the point - I want the expectation of privacy and the deployment of tools to maintain privacy in the face of technological and legal "advances" in surveillance to seem closer to "technologically informed libertarian" rather than "paranoid wingnut" or "jetliner-hijacking 3rd-world-sympathiser".
"A global passive adversary is the most commonly assumed threat when analyzing theoretical anonymity designs. But like all practical low-latency systems, Tor does not protect against such a strong adversary. Instead, we assume an adversary who can observe some fraction of network traffic; who can generate, modify, delete, or delay traffic; who can operate onion routers of his own; and who can compromise some fraction of the onion routers."[1]
If your attacker is not "a global passive adversary"(GPA) what dots are they going to connect if you renew your car registration? If your attacker is a GPA they are already connecting all the dots.
The "renew my car registration" example was intended to imply that'd I've chosen to "give them some connected dots" - dots which are operationally useless (or worse - preferably adding noise to make the job harder and evidence that the job is sometimes wasted effort).
I'm assuming "they" have access to government servers and networks, and that they'll easily be able to connect me - as a real and (at least mostly) law abiding citizen - to a clean-slate browser using SSL over TOR - logging in to a government web server with real world credentials and doing some mundane and law abiding everyday task.
I don't get what you mean. You think that once you connect to https://site.gov/ they can easily match the traffic entering the tor network with the traffic that exited tor and initiated the web connection?
I think the point was that it defeats the common purpose of using anonymity software if you are submitting identifying information (your car registration information) through it. It doesn't necessarily have long term consequences—you can generate a new identity—but it nullifies that session's anonymity.
However, that doesn't mean there isn't a good reason to use it anyway to make a statement and promote legitimate usage of Tor.
This reminds me of something that I thought of late one night that I feel needs to happen: tor, or something like it, distributed as the payload of a virus. Hopefully a very serious one.
Then, even if things get patched, it's mere existence and prevelence among the layman gives you a tremendous amount of plausible deniability while also increasing the strength of the network.
However, it's quite morally wrong to do so. I guess it's just one of those late-night thoughts.
I'm pretty sure any professional paranoid would have been thinking I was dodgy for decades now, for things like using the internet (back when that was suspicious) or encrypting my logins with ssh (back when that was suspicious) or my websites with SSL (back when that was suspicious) or running weirdo commie unix-derivatives on my machines instead of honest commercial OSes (back when that was... well, unusual). This putative paranoid gaze has not affected my actual life in the least. I'm sure the paranoids are well aware that most opportunistic encryptors are, like me, random geeks with a slight antiauthoritarian streak and nothing whatsoever of interest to national security. I'm happy to help move the Overton window in the direction of greater privacy and ensure that the people who do actually need anonymity and security can get it.
