good troll, intelligence psyops, or the genuine article? you decide

[Eugen Leitl]

On Thu, Sep 17, 2009 at 03:59:17PM -0400, Brian Mearns wrote:

> Could you explain what psyops refers to? Psychological operations? If
> I understand correctly, you're suggesting that perhaps he/his
> organization doesn't really have all the capabilities he implies, but
> that they're trying to scare people away from using technologies they
> can't beat?

In a nutshell, yes. A composite picture of capabilities implied in 
http://www.reddit.com/user/Grobbage (I've put a copy at 
http://eugen.leitl.org/Grobbage.txt since he's already deleted/edited
some content, claiming he inandvertedly told too much) is quite 
impressive. Perhaps too impressive. There's a strong scent of
bullshit adhering to some of his claims, particularly considering
pedophilia materials and EvilDoers(tm) thwarted. Psyops has to
be credible to be effective.

It doesn't however mean that most of the points he/she made are wrong,
quite the opposite. I would consider these reasonable, conservative 
assumptions about now or near future capabilities of our adversary.

It's better to think that your adversary is more capable than assuming
the opposite. This isn't necessarily about Tor, since Tor explicitly
wasn't designed to deal with that kind of threat model. However, it's
a good idea to think about how to make the job of our theoretical
Grobbages as interesting as possible. I'm sure they'll rise up
to the challenge ;) 

A good first way to start would be to dump http://www.reddit.com/user/Grobbage
into a wiki, and annotate the heck out of it.

-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
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