[tor-talk] NSA PRISM implications for Tor

[grarpamp]

> The report mentions that they have direct access to ISP's servers as
> well as service providers such as Microsoft, Google and Yahoo.  Since
> most US users end up going to US websites, does this imply that NSA now
> has end-to-end correlation available on most US internet users?  I.e. is
> Tor's usefulness finished for Americans?

That is clueless newsspeak, direct access to servers would be silly.
What is new 'news' here is that this is most likely a meta / realtime
interface to particular datasets, and tool development for same, use
your imagination here. And certainly a formal direct path to their
respective government liason desks in the web3.0/etc sector.

Anyone who has been following 'news', since say 2000, might
rightly be able to imply a number of things? One of those might
be that governments have both their own capabilities, and can
harness those of corporations (such as telecoms, social, mail, OS),
to suit their interests, lawful or otherwise? Is it not hard to speculate
that, cooperation or not, tapping the mesh of Tier-1 and corporate
exchange points would not provide significant correlation for wholly
resident communications? Or that simple 'here you go, enjoy the
data' giveaways under corporate immunity provisions? And triple
and more massive datacenter builds? You don't build those things
unless your napkin sketch says it is doable. But to what ends?
The remaining real questions might be, are you of interest? And
where are the canaries? Where news reports of all these 'terrorists'
being stopped and jailed? Does such common crimefighting have
such need for secrecy? What are the ends? Geopolitical? Local?
What does history say? What is the future?