At 11:11 8/19/2015 -0400, you wrote:
But all that bot traffic creates a lot of statistical "background noise," and so may be providing a service in making it more difficult for advanced adversaries to perform traffic correlation analysis.
Thoughts anyone?
Here is one excellent reason to love Bot traffic:
The Latest Rules on How Long NSA Can Keep Americans Encrypted Data Look Too Familiar by Marshall Erwin January 22, 2015
https://www.justsecurity.org/19308/congress-latest-rules-long-spies-hold-enc...
Recently-enacted legislation permits the NSA to retain all US domestic "incidentally collected" encrypted traffic they think might be of interest _forever_ with the idea that it might be decrypted or analyzed more completely with future technology.
So the more garbage flung around by bots, the better (as long as Tor remains usable), as it increases the difficulty and cost of storing Tor traffic by orders-of-magnitude.