[tor-relays] How can we trust the guards?

[Aeris]

> I do not know how to interpret this table. How many guards are there at any
> given time?

Currently, we have 2442 guards.
This number is not fix but vary each days depending of community efforts to 
maintain stable nodes with enough bandwidth.

> Known to whom? Is there a Tor police that researches "unknown" guards? How
> do you measure "known"? How do they become "known"? Something akin to key
> signing parties? Secret meetings in Munich biergartens?

Major operators are not anonymous and closed to the Tor project or others 
privacy aware association.
On the top guard operator, I see Tor developers, EFF members, privacy aware 
email provider, privacy aware hosting provider, scientists, known hacktivists, 
people active on this list, VPN providers… Not at all related to three-letters 
agencies (or we must begin to fear about global conspiracy able to subponea 
all those kinds of people/association/companies on this planet during 
decades…).

> Conversely, if someone installs a high performance relay, during the first
> 70 days is there a secret police investigation giving the operator a clean
> bill of health or conversely marking her as a rogue?

All nodes are watched permanently by a bunch of tools :
	https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/
ReportingBadRelays#Doyouactivelylookforbadrelays

During the 70d, bad behaviour will be detected and associated nodes banned.
And if we don’t detect anything bad during this time, so even if those nodes 
are controled by bad guys, we don’t care because they help the network !
Tor node selection for circuits will address this trouble and avoid you to use 
more than 1 of their nodes in the same circuit, preventing any anonymity 
problem.
The best we can do in such case is to contact the operator to speak about 
diversity problem and to ask for shuting down some nodes if we consider he 
controls more consensus he should.

Regards,
-- 
Aeris
Individual crypto-terrorist group self-radicalized on the digital Internet
https://imirhil.fr/

Protect your privacy, encrypt your communications
GPG : EFB74277 ECE4E222
OTR : 5769616D 2D3DAC72
https://café-vie-privée.fr/
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